OUTBREAK
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1995 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: The first 80 minutes of this film are
an accurate, frightening, and original look at an
all too real threat, the possibility that an
Ebola-like virus would get loose in the United
States. But, unlike Robert Wise directing
ANDROMEDA STRAIN, Wolfgang Petersen did not trust
science and character to drive his story. He mires
the final third in the cliches of an action film
and betrays the power of his material. We have an
interesting action thriller instead of a real
classic. Rating: high +2 (-4 to +4). Some minor
spoilers in the review and a separate article of
(non-spoiler) comments on epidemic predictions
follow the main body of the article.
The film starts with a quote saying that viruses pose the greatest threat to human existence on this planet. That is probably fairly accurate.
Hey, want to see something really scary? I am not talking scary because things jump out at you or actors wear plastic masks. I am talking scary because it is only too possible. It probably has already come near to happening in recent years. Most of OUTBREAK is a very credible extrapolation of what might well happen if a seriously dangerous virus got loose in this country. If Zaire Ebola had gotten loose close to home the events shown in OUTBREAK are really quite possible. In fact it is difficult to read the non-fiction books THE COMING PLAGUE by Laurie Garrett or THE HOT ZONE by Richard Preston without envisioning scenarios not unlike the one in this film.
As the film opens with an outbreak of a viral disease in Zaire in 1967, the U.S. Army's response to eliminate the disease is quick but effective. Twenty-eight years later an Army team from Fort Dietrich led by Dr. Sam Daniels (Dustin Hoffman) finds a new viral disease has broken out in the Motaba River Valley and dubs the disease Motaba. Even Daniels, who is used to working with the likes of Ebola, Lassa, and Hanta, is frightened by the virulence of Motaba. And even as he is returning home to report the terrible new disease, Motaba virus is traveling to the U.S. by its own route. And a disease with the virulence to infect 260,000,000 people in 48 hours and to kill them in not much more is loosed.
Daniels wants to pursue the new disease but is ordered off. Ironically, his ex-wife, Dr. Roberta Keough (Rene Russo), who works for the Centers for Disease Control, has an opportunity to investigate the same disease Sam has told her about. Daniels finds his strings being pulled by his superior officer, played by Morgan Freman, and a higher- up general, played by Donald Sutherland, neither of whom want him working on the new virus. Sutherland is quick to call in drastic action to quarantined areas. "Be compassionate," he tells a Presidential commission on the crisis, "but be compassionate globally." What he sees as compassion on the global level is something very different on the local level. The film clearly doesn't agree with this policy, but under the circumstances he may be talking sense.
One problem with the script by Laurence Dworet and Robert Roy Pool is that it is all too obviously trying both to be realistic and at the same time to be an action film. The two just don't go that well together. OUTBREAK wastes time on developing the rocky relationship between the two divorced doctors. Then it wastes the last third of the film on an unlikely and gratuitous action story built around a surprisingly tired and over-used premise. It makes a human the villain as if the story did not have enough viral villains. And the human villain's motive is a strikingly overused cliche. More disappointing, the race to understand and control the new virus is diverted into a standard action-film chase. This takes time and emphasis away from more interesting questions such as how is it possible to maintain a strict quarantine on a town of 2600 people? When the chases are over it is all the harder to remember what set this story apart from so many similar action films.
It is a shock to see Dustin Hoffman in a science fiction film and one in which he plays an action hero, albeit a reluctant one. Donald Sutherland plays much the same character he played in PUPPET MASTERS, though he plays the character as seen from a different viewpoint. Rene Russo is competent and likable in her role, and it is nice to have a woman over thirty-five in a starring role, but she does not imbue her character with any real power. Curiously, for a German, director Wolfgang Petersen seems to have a need to put action in a story that might work better as a more cerebral piece. That is a fault here even as it was with his ENEMY MINE.
This is a film I can well recommend for its first two-thirds and if you have come that far, at least you will not be bored when the film turns from extrapolation to action. But the final forty minutes or so has some serious sacrifices of logic for commerciality. Somebody apparently decided that the more interesting and more credible story would not sell. I was at times thinking this would be a strong +3, but it lost a point in the final reel. It remains a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
The following are comments I made about OUTBREAK before seeing the film:
"Let me put it this way. In its present form the Satan Bug is an extremely refined powder. I take a saltspoon of this powder, go outside into the grounds of Mordon and turn the saltspoon upside down. What happens? Every person in Mordon would be dead within the hour, the whole of Wiltshire would be an open tomb by dawn. In a week, ten days, all life would have ceased to exist in Britain. I mean all life. The Plague, the Black Death--as nothing compared with this. Long before the last man died in agony, ships or planes or birds or just the
waters of the North Sea would have carried the Satan Bug to Europe. We can conceive of no obstacle that can stop its eventual world-wide spread. Two months, I would say two months at the very most.... The Lapp in the far north of Sweden. The Chinese peasant tilling his rice fields in the Yangtze valley. The cattle rancher on his station in the Australian outback, the shopper on Fifth Avenue, the primitive in Tierra del Fuego. All dead. Because I turned a saltspoon upside down.... Who would be the last to go? I cannot say. Perhaps the great albatross forever winging its way round the bottom of the world. Perhaps a handful of Eskimos deep in the Arctic basin. But the seas travel the world over, and so also do the winds; one day, one day soon, they too would die."
That was from the novel THE SATAN BUG by Ian Stuart (a pen name for Alastair MacLean). Almost the identical quote was used in the film version. And it hooked me into a different type of science fiction I had not known about before, epidemiological science fiction which looks at what would happen if some really virulent and contagious disease got loose on modern society.
I like to consider science fiction a field where people are thinking out some of the most serious issues that could be shaping our future. It is the ideal place to work out some of the more frightening epidemic scenarios, much as it was for working out scenarios of nuclear war. But on the whole science fiction writers have avoided talking about disease or have limited themselves to separating themselves from the real action by examining isolated groups of scientists as in ANDROMEDA STRAIN or the aftermath as in EARTH ABIDES or the British television series SURVIVORS. Even THE STAND concentrated only on people who were to survive. The time is right for science fiction to consider the most serious societal aspects of epidemics, but I do not know if OUTBREAK is the right film.
Consider some of the issues that particularly dangerous viruses raise. Suppose some new virus that came along was something so bad that the rights of the afflicted were overwhelmed by the danger they pose to those not yet afflicted. That is pretty much what happened with diseases in the Middle Ages, and all our medical research has done has been to raise the threshold a little to make it harder for a disease to reach that level. Science fiction writers, be they in literature or film, have never seemed as excited by that concept as they might be. The attitude of writers has seemed to be, "After all, we have licked polio and smallpox and it is just a matter of time for the rest of the diseases." Well, now people are starting to realize that we are not as secure as we thought. Malaria and tuberculosis are on the rebound; AIDS is not readily amenable to treatment. And we think of AIDS as being a horrible disease, but we still have the luxury (and, yes, the responsibility) to consider the rights of the victim. If AIDS was as contagious as Zaire Ebola the politics of dealing with it would have to be very different. (Incidentally, a very sobering thought: the best evidence is that Sudan Ebola did not have a common origin with Zaire Ebola. That means that in the course of a few short months nature had invented the Ebola virus twice.) How would we handle a disease for which care-giving was tantamount to suicide? What if the mere proximity of victims constituted a genuine threat? Many of the most bigoted myths and exaggerations about AIDS are theoretically possible in some disease. In fact, even AIDS is probably worse in some regards than the disease in OUTBREAK. It has a much longer interval of contagion before showing symptoms. Combine that with high susceptibility and you have a monster a few microns long that is a lot scarier than anything most writers have considered so far. Hopefully, recent books on the subject of newly emerging diseases may get people thinking about these issues even if science fiction writers continue to shy away from the subject.
Mark R. Leeper
mark.leeper@att.com
Copyright 1995 Mark R. Leeper
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