It is one of the great scare stories of our time, the idea that there are somewhere in the untouched rain forests some very harmful germs, and if they ever cross over from the jungle into the human bloodstream, there will be a p***e of a drastic magnitude, more than what there ever has been.
Wolfgang Petersen’s “Outbreak” is an intelligent, very intense, and entertaining thriller about that. It traces the history of a microorganism that could put a human being in a coma within 24 hours of exposure because the bug is said to dissolve all the internal organs or, the humanity centers, to say the least in the most blunt way. Not a pretty sight. The bug is hypothetical an account of something like it is indeed provided in Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone. The thriller operates in territory that includes any number of science fiction movies based on catastrophic invasions and technological sabotage, but it has been made with an imagination and a nice human touch.
31 years back the viewers of “Outbreak” are transported to Africa. The syphilitic village is desolated by the incurable virus which the American doctors approach with propaganda heads to heal. It doesn’t happen as they promise. While such grim circumstances dictate action, only a single fighter plane with incendiary bombs is sent to explore the area around the settlement. Civilization seems unable to confront the germ in any more humane way. The narrative provides no context on how this bug originated or how it found its way to such isolated regions, other than a warning from a village’s witch doctor: “People must not burn the trees. Too much killing.” The Overall time shifts to the modern days Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo now play a divorced couple but with a twist as both struggle with micro-organisms as their profession. With the US army in his lap, his ex-wife has joined CDC in Atlanta and we witness the dilapidation of their relationship. In between riveting events, Petersen fires multiple episodes of smuggling an African monkey and its illegal entry into the United States across the screen. Even though the smuggler can not capitalize on the contaminated animal in California and so he throws it in a forest and gets infected himself.
As Petersen’s disease template progresses, he depicts one carrier spreading the disease onto another carrier in a scene that would evoke laughter if it hadn’t been so disturbing: He boards a flight to Boston; the poor man is exhausted and shirt drenched with sweat and hardly able to stand except of course his girlfriend goes undeterred on the illness and breaches him for an epic kiss. In a small Californian village, a crowded cinema witnesses a perturbing scenario where an infected person decides to sneeze, while the camera zooms onto the germs as they disseminate through the filling audience. In one sub-plot, a scientist is infected when a test tube containing a sample gets smashed while it is still inside the centrifuge, and so forth. This was unprecedented! It was especially fascinating when a smuggler aboard a plane takes a single bite of his cookie, and some minor says in surprise to the smuggler that is he going to consume the remaining half.
Not long after the word comes that the plague has now broken out in Boston and California. That is when Hoffman gets assigned to the case by his boss Officer Morgan Freeman. But as he and another member of the team Kevin Spacey are tracing the pattern in which the virus was transported and what went on the other side, glimpses are given to the audience about an even more terrible picture and a conspiracy that involves the superior officer of Freeman, a wicked general Donald Sutherland. The army seems to be harboring some strange secrets when it comes to this bacteria. It also has an antidote, but after the microbe evolves into a non-ideal form, the only one who can provide an antibody is the original carrier a monkey.
Petersen and his scriptwriters, Laurence Dworet and Robert Roy Pool, begin constructing the plot of a very exciting spine-chiller fiction combining the conventions of several different genres. Medical detective investigation, military intrigue, love and professional rivalry, and finally the action climax where Hoffman and his brave helicopter pilot Cuba Gooding Jr. pursue the race against time in the skies over California and reach a big ship in the middle of the ocean to prevent another catastrophic bomb drop.
“Outbreak” is one of those films where you are quite happy to sit back and feel as though you are being played by the filmmakers. The Hoffman character is nothing more than a badly rewritten plot device that has been carted out of twenty other films. He’s the military equivalent of that old crime cliché, the Cop with a Theory No One Believes always turns up to save the day in the end. It is easy to picture Sutherland in a Soviet uniform and playing the anti-hero in the new HBO film, “Citizen X,” with how familiar the role he plays in this film is. However, the characters have depth and are not one-dimensional, and Morgan Freeman, who plays a general in the middle of the chaos, actually delivers something rather authentic; a general who is torn to follow orders or listen to his better judgment.
Chasing after someone or something at the end of the film has become a requirement in this day and age because of how sensitive and impatient the viewers tend to be, as such, Oscar would not have rewarded a film that simply ended because the dialogue was over without geographical movement. I don’t know if I believed the helicopter chase in “Outbreak,” and I’m sorry, I don’t believe a helicopter is going to be able to stand off against a bomber (a scene that references Dr. Strangelove quite heavily). However, by that point, the film had, rather resourcefully, intertwined its personal, military, medical, and scientific story threads into four countdowns and I was sold.
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