Why live underground?

I do. It would take time to build all of that stuff which they wouldn't have if people were dying off quickly. That means that the people who did build the shelter would have had to have been immune.

Your conclusion is the result of some pretty spurious reasoning and is predicated on both a fundamental flaw in logic as well as a lack of regard for some petty obvious data points which are evident quite early in the film.

At *no* point does the film indicate that the survivors are immune to the virus. In fact, all of the evidence we see early on in the film quite clearly indicates otherwise. As someone else pointed out, the film's protagonist, James Cole, is outfitted and equipped with a pressurized biohazard hazmat suit at the beginning of the film for his mission to the surface to collect samples. Also, if one listens to the instructions being given to him while he is "suiting up", we can hear a taped voice detailing what sounds like a series of safety protocols, the purpose of which is to protect him from contaminating himself and bringing it back into the facility upon his return. In fact, the voice in the recording quite clearly states that if his suit is in any way compromised while he is on the surface, he will not be allowed back in. Furthermore, he exits the facility by way of an airlock where over-pressure is clearly being used to mitigate the possibility of any airborne pathogens from contaminating the facility. On Mr. Cole's return he undergoes a series of decontamination procedures and submits blood samples. Again a taped voice in the background mentions that any evidence of exposure to germs will result in his being denied access to the rest of the population. Following this process, he is eventually "cleared from quarantine" and is readmitted to the facility.

So, I am not sure which "stuff" it is to which you are referring, but my guess is that the underground facility in which the population is living was some sort of preexisting underground civil defense shelter/bunker. Various levels of government in most western countries have these sorts of facilities in place for just the sort of situation described in this movie.

Furthermore, being under the surface isn't going to protect one from airborne infection any better than any sort of construction that could been build much faster and cheaply above ground.

Underground bunkers actually make excellent places in which to survive any sort of NBC (Nuclear/Biological/Chemical) incidents, far superior to freestanding structures, for a host of reasons, the primary one being that it gives those who are holed up in it very well defined points of control in terms of restricting access to the facility. This holds true for restricting both large biological threats (Bad People) as well as microscopic ones, such as your conventional nasty biota (through air filtration, maintaining positive air pressure, etc). In a freestanding structure, breaches can occur any any point in the external perimeter which can make securing the thing an absolute nightmare and prohibitively difficult, perhaps unrealistically so. This also holds true for defending the facility against attack when society and rule of law break down. Furthermore, with regard to airborne pathogens, people are often under the misconception that this means that the air is just teeming with virulent germs of viruses, which is not the case. These sorts of pathogen still require a vector in order to spread, they just do so via the air, usually in the form of an aerosolized excretion ejected from the source vector (think a sneeze or cough). In addition to the obvious route of direct transmission in this scenario (breathing in the excretion) it can also settle on objects in the environment which then may be touched and later ingested via the mouth or a mucous membrane. So, in short, we do not have clouds of nasty germs blowing around through the air as some might imagine. The long and the short of it is this, bunkers Good, buildings Bad.

As someone else has already mentioned, Terry Gilliam has given us a great setting here with the potential for many, many great story-lines and characters. I just hope that the television show can live up to the promise.

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If they're immune to the original, then the "sciencey" thing about that is it typically passes to their children. However, that immunity may not be transferable to the rest of humanity, via transfusions or extracting the antibodies or whatever from their system.

This latter proposal is called passive immunity, and is typically temporary, if it works at all, vs. active immunity, in which somebody survives a bug attack and their body's immune system develops permanent or "active" and ongoing protection.

Anyway, besides immunity inheritance (passing to your children), being immune means that the virus may be/is in their body, and they can get it that way. It's floating around in there.

Of course, while it is, it's not making them sick because... they're immune, or so the theory goes.

But why then would they then need the original virus?

In that regard, I've never quite understood the logic of needing that source bug.

Unless... they are immune to one or more of the mutations that happened quickly in early 1996. Perhaps it was some variation that wasn't fatal to everybody it came in contact with.

In that case, they would still be very interested in the source bug, indeed!

(I had to do all this sort of research in 2008 when I wrote some fan fic sequels of this amazing flick)

My old 12 Monkeys links page:
http://www.stevegarry.ca/tempesta-tormenta

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