Six years have passed since Covid-19 sparked a global pandemic the likes no one had seen in a long time. It’s no surprise movies like “Outbreak” and “Contagion” became so popular while people were having to shelter-in-place.
“Outbreak” had been released in March 1995 mostly in an attempt to get ahead of the based on a true story movie “Crisis in The Hot Zone” about the Ebola virus. While the latter was turned into a miniseries which premiered in 2019, “Outbreak” is more action-oriented as “The Hot Zone” is similar to “The Andromeda Strain” taking place mostly in labs and offices.
Basically, “Outbreak” harkens back to the natural disaster movies of the 1970s where this one is a Ebola-like virus Motaba which was discovered in Zaire. The prologue has two Army medical doctors William Ford (Morgan Freeman) and Donald McClintock (Donald Sutherland) discovering the virus during 1967 and what it does to people. Fearing a bigger outbreak, they order a bombing of the area killing all people who have it.
By the mid-1990s, they’ve been promoted to generals.
Col. Sam Daniels (Dustin Hoffman) notices an outbreak similar in a Zaire village but Ford, his superior, dismisses it as a major concern. Daniels’ ex-wife, Dr. Roberta Keough (Rene Russo) has taken a new position at the CDC in Atlanta where they are alerted to two cases in Boston of a couple, James Scott (Patrick Dempsey) and his girlfriend, Alice (Kellie Overbey), who have been quarantined with a deadly virus. James works at an animal testing facility in Northern California and stole a white-faced capuchin monkey that was captured in Zaire. James had hoped to sell it to a pet store in Cedar Creek, Calif., but it’s the wrong gender and it scratches the proprietor.
So James just releases it into the wooded area on the way to the airport. But not before the monkey spits in his mouth. He develops symptoms on the flight and kisses Alice at Boston terminal before collapsing.
Keough and her team go to investigate but soon learn it’s just isolated between the couple. But the relief doesn’t last as the pet store proprietor gets deathly sick from the scratch and dies at the hospital. And a lab technician causes a foolish accident and gets a sample of the blood in his face. He, too, gets sick fast while collapsing while at the movie theater.
It’s funny how director Wolfgang Pedersen and writers Laurence Dworet and Robert Roy Pool show how simple a serious virus can spread by things we don’t take as seriously. James is looking bad at the airport. Why does Alice kiss him? Earlier on the plane, a woman stops her young son from getting a cookie James took a bite of but doesn’t want. Why does the store proprietor not have better gloves when handling a monkey from the jungle? Could it have all been contained better if the lab technician had just gone home and went to bed rather than out to see a movie with his partner?
The tech had a vial of blood in a centrifuge and was careless causing it to break. And as the Motaba virus has reacted with his body, it’s now mutated that it’s airborne rather than just being passed through bodily fluids transfer.
Dworet had been a medical doctor before writing the script with Pool that was rewritten by Ted Tally. But you can tell Dworet is probably using some real cases he’s handled or studied. A lot of people don’t take hygiene seriously. They don’t wash their hands or even use sanitizer. We live in a society where people have been fired from their jobs for being too sick to work. I should know. It’s happened to me 20 years ago and I was handling produce food.
Even worse we live in a society that things the rules don’t apply to them. When the military quarantines Cedar Creek, some people try to break out of town only to get in a firefight. It might have seemed ludicrous in 1995 but people really went over the edge in 2020-2021. They didn’t care about other people. They wanted to go eat at restaurants and get their nails done.
At the same time, hospitals were having to put dead bodies in freezer trailers because the morgues were full. If this had happened 100 years ago, the bodies would’ve been thrown into huge open graves with lye covering them. There is a scene in “Outbreak” where they zip up dozens of bodies in bags where they’re set in an old barn that is set ablaze. It’s these scenes that make the movie horrifying as they focus on fears of being discarded. But it’s really the only way the government can keep the virus from spreading at a bigger rate.
But one has to entertain the possibility that before people started getting sick, someone passed through town or had to go somewhere on a business trip.
McClintock argues Cedar Creek needs to be bombed to stop the spread but it’s actually to keep the Zaire variant viable as a biological weapon. The government already has a vaccine serum but finding one of the Cedar Creek variant is going to be difficult. And this happens as both Keough and Lt. Col. Casey Schuler (Kevin Spacey) both have become infected through simple mistakes. Schuler becomes tired and exhausted causing a tear in his lab suit and Keough gets it when she accidentally stabs herself in the hand with a syringe needle she uses to treat Schuler when he starts showing symptoms. It happens in the medical field. Doctors and nurses work long hours and slip ups happen.
The third act has Daniels and Maj. Salt (Cuba Gooding Jr.) racing against the clock to find the monkey and stop McClintock from bombing the town. There’s a nice scene where J.T. Walsh plays the White House Chief of Staff who is opposed to the bombing.
But it does make you wonder if the government could’ve stopped Covid-19 at the beginning with the firebombing of a few thousand people, is it worth it?
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 