Subject: REVIEW: OUTBREAK

From: [email-masked] (Mark R. Leeper)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 19:19:52 GMT

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
					[email-masked]
					Copyright 1995 Mark R. Leeper