I think we should start with the elephant in the room – the covid-19 pandemic. So what better movie to watch and further scare the bejesus out of you than Outbreak? As it turns out, it’s not that scary at all – in fact it was downright laughable. The movie started as a flashback to 1967in Africa where an ebola-like virus decimated a village. Americans came to check it out, found it was 100% lethal and killed in two days. Fortunately, it was transmitted only by bodily contact of fluids. They took a blood sample, then left and promised to drop supplies. A little later, here comes the plane. Yay, the remaining villagers are saved! A parachute dropped out of the plane attached to a single large barrel. The smiles of one of the officials turned to horror as he realized it’s not supplies – it’s a daisy cutter bomb. Ka-boom – everything was vaporized, end of the virus. Oh, but as the scene ends, they showed monkeys running away – ooops! We knew where this was going.
Before we continue with the plot, let’s get to the cast. Dustin Hoffman played colonel Sam Daniels, an army infectious disease doctor. His ex-wife was Renee Russo – as infectious disease doctor Robby Keough – and in usual movie playbook – they had gone through a difficult divorce, Renee wanted to move on, Dustin couldn’t accept it and thought they still had chance to get back. Well of course that’s going to happen, right?
Kevin Spacey was one of Sam’s team doctors, Casey. Did you ever notice that this guy almost always plays characters that are dicks? My theory is, actors tend to play characters close to their actual personality, so my guess is Spacey really is a dick. In this role, he played a smug, know it all, asshole. So when he stupidly got exposed to the virus, and collapsed into a ridiculously hammy rack of convulsions, I cheered… good riddance!
Also on the team – Cuba Gooding Jr. as Doctor Salt. Fortunately, he got better after this movie, because this performance blew. Then the “bad guys” – US army generals who secretly took the blood sample from 1967 as a biological weapon, and also created and stockpiled a “serum” that miraculously cures this disease. More on this nonsense later. They were played by Morgan Freeman, Sam’s boss, and Donald Sutherland, Freeman’s boss. Oh and later in the movie, there’s Cap’n Dale Dye. You know, that guy who looks like a cartoon character of a military officer (he actually was a captain in the army, then retired and started Soldier of Fortune magazine). He shows up in string of movies as an officer of various ranks. I think his first movie was Platoon.
Anywho, let’s do a comparison of real life vs Hollywood fiction. The movie fantasy disease was 100% lethal in a few days – which on it’s face was ludicrous. A disease that fatal would never survive as it would kill off its hosts too quickly. But it gets more ridiculous: in real life, the governments of the world say, “There is a pandemic of a super-flu that is especially lethal in the elderly and those with co-morbidities. We want everyone to shelter in place for at least a month”. And pretty much everyone complies. In this fantasy land, a small town of less than four thousand got infected with this 100% lethal disease. The army rolled in to quarantine the town. And how did the residents react? They panicked and flooded the streets, even as armed soldiers tried to get them into their houses. Come on, man! This was one of many laugh-out-loud moments in this movie – and all the more laughable due to our experience with a real pandemic.
So to summarize the rest of the movie, the disease infected most of the inhabitants of the town. The government decided the only way to eliminate the virus and prevent spreading across the country was to vaporize the town. Just like how the movie started, only a bigger boom. This seems to be the answer for all such situations – remember The Andromeda Strain? Computer models showed the virus spreading and basically killing everyone in the country in a few weeks. Again more malarkey. But Sam and Salt were trying to save the day. Did I mention Robby got infected too, and ws near death? Somehow, the “important” characters got a disease that initially killed in two to three days but now they hung on much longer – who was in charge of the timeline here!
So they decided the only way to stop the pandemic was to find the monkey that started the infection, realizing it was immune to the virus but also carrying it and infectious – more hooey. Sam and Salt flew to the mountains to wait for the monkey to come out to a little girl who had been feeding him (yet somehow she never got infected), In the nick of time, they shot it with a tranquilizer gun and returned to the doomed town. Now all Salt had to do was extract the “serum” from the monkey and scale it up thousands of times to save all the infected that somehow hadn’t died yet. But there was more drama to contend with – the town was about to get blowed up. Who’s going to save the day now – Sam! He and Salt (who somehow knew how to fly a military helicopter) talked the bomber pilots into disobeying direct orders from the President to drop the bomb. Instead, they committed treason, dropped the bomb in the ocean and flew back to base. Then Salt whips up enough “serum” in a few hours to save everyone. Finally, the resolution – it turned out the mean old generals knew about this virus the whole time and had a cure for it, so they got arrested as the final “applause” moment in this idiotic tale of fucking HORSESHIT!
I give this movie 14 SARS-Cov-2 spike proteins out of 74. Watch just for morbid curiosity about how absurdly wrong Hollywood envisioned a potential global pandemic.