Outbreak (1995)
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
A deadly airborne virus finds its way into the USA and starts killing off people at an epidemic rate. Col. Sam Daniels' job is to stop the virus spreading from a small town, which must be quarantined, and to prevent an over reaction by the White House.
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What critics compared Outbreak to
Or, in more recent terms, it’s like Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak (1995) minus the monkey and with more than two functioning brain cells.
Director Steven Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns eschew hysterical melodrama (e.g., 1995’s Outbreak) in favor of a matter-of-fact tracing of the disease from its first victim (Gwyneth Paltrow) through the far-flung efforts to cope with the spreading mortality.
Same goes for that symphony of coughing that invariably accompanies any public screening experience: Once an annoyance, the unwelcome noise takes on a threatening edge in this context -- a reminder of the scene in 1995's Ebola-inspired film "Outbreak," in which someone sneezes in a movie theater and the camera follows the swarm of germs around the darkened room.
It’s hard not to immediately hearken back to Wolfgang Petersen’s 1995 heart-pounder, Outbreak, the last major pandemic film with a stellar cast.
We expect to see the graphs where the color red envelops continents with each passing day and the eventual breakdown in human civility as lack of knowledge turns into desperation, but nothing about the film feels sensationalistic or headed towards some big action climax a la Dustin Hoffman running down the monkey and playing helicopter chicken in Outbreak.
The premise itself is sure to draw more than a cursory comparison to 1995's "Outbreak," but "Contagion" stands as the superior, less commercially reliant effort.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Visuals Characters
I am not sure I believed the helicopter chase sequence in "Outbreak," and I am sure I didn't believe the standoff between a helicopter and a bomber (in a scene with echoes of " Dr. Strangelove ").
His portrayal, like his character, would be more at home in Dr. Strangelove than here, and it's a sore spot that the movie never quite recovers from.
I don?t know if German-born director Petersen, whose more recent credits include Outbreak, Air Force One, and The Perfect Storm , and writer Benioff, who broke onto the scene two years ago with the Spike Lee-directed adaptation of his own novel 25th Hour, intended for this to be a tribute to those extremely expensive, showy, and badly acted classics of the 1960s like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, or whether it happened by accident.
The great idea of screenwriter David Benioff (25th Hour) and director Wolfgang Petersen (here more in Outbreak mode than Das Boot) was to adapt Homer's epic poem, The Iliad, and take out the gods.
So do bits lifted from other movies: "The Shining," "Outbreak," "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," "The Day the Earth Stood Still," "Tremors" . . . the list goes on, but I started to get writer's cramp trying to keep up.
In opposition to this lot is Col. Abraham Curtis (Morgan Freeman), who, in a blend of Men in Black, Outbreak, and X- Files, has been secretly chasing aliens with his secret team of soldiers for 25 years, and whose solution to the residue they leave on human beings, a red stain nicknamed Ripley (after Alien), is to destroy all the residents of any given community whom the aliens have visited and "infected."
The Monster"), but it also filches ideas from the movies Alien (1979), the John Carpenter remake of The Thing (1982), Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Hidden (1987), and even the overheated plague picture Outbreak (1995).
Morgan Freeman plays Colonel Abraham Curtis, a character very similar to another military officer he played in “Outbreak.”