Outbreak
Curious, this is another earlier strain of Contagion, but bloated with a shitload of unrelated films mixed in. Like Andromeda Strain, but good, not infected with Crichton crap.
It’s even more conspiratorial, involving military people, so it’s still far too fantastic. Kate Winslet’s sort of equivalent survives, but she’s not very heroic.
Some American mercs in Zaire catch a kind of fancy Ebola, so military doctors get there, get their sample, and throw a MOAB to vaporise the camp.
This is another of a long long list of US Military cover ups, but this time, some monkeys got away, the virus shows up almost 20 years later, around the same place.
Our protagonist gets there, and they try to save the people, I guess, even though his superior already have tons of the antibodies in storage. It spreads more and more, until it reaches America.
A South Korean freighter brings a Zairian monkey to California (WTF, did they sail the other way around, through the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn? Why).
One of the guys working on the live animals warehouse bribes the guard to smuggle the monkey out of there, into a friendly pet store. Not sure why McDreamy needs a side job, he could just model underwear, or work at Chippendales.
There’s a mutation leading to an outbreak is a small town, it’s fucking bedlam out there, closer to Resident Evil than COVID. They Secure the place, Contain the virus , and Protect the military secrets that lead to this fuckup.
Our protagonist is an USMRIID dude and his team is very good:
- ex-wife that jumped ship to the CDC
- snappy veteran that seen it all
- FNG, some young overachiever that never actually saw someone shitting themselves to death.
The protagonist doesn’t take no for an answer, that’s why he disobeys direct orders, and doesn’t accept the ex wife’s divorce. It works out in the end on both fronts, so what do I know.
At some point, they hijack an helicopter to fly to San Francisco, fly to the same cargo ship from the beginning to get pictures of the monkey, then burst their way into a local station where they hold up pictures of the monkey on live TV, then they get the actual monkey!
As they get back, they outmanoeuvre two Black Hawks, I bet Sikorsky hates this film with a passion and they bankrolled Black Hawk Down to counter it.
They get back, synthesise the cure, then get back in the air to play chicken with a bomber that will obliterate the town. They also achieve this!
By the time they have the cure, hundreds of people already died, including mothers that have been focused on. But it has to end on the divorced dude and his ex, now future wife again?
This is the kind of film most acting titans sleepwalk though. Kevin Spacey does his thing from L.A. Confidential among others, Dustin Hoffman does an amazing joke about his own nose with a child actor out of nowhere and nearly bursts out laughing, and René Russo wears unflattering clothes for the entire film. Cuba Gooding Jr removes the stick up his ass throughout the film. Morgan Freeman is the not-bad guy, while Donald Sutherland is the actual bad guy, having a lot of fun. He pulls his Invasion of the Body Snatchers face, several times.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.