K O R O V A M U L T I M E D I A R E V I E W S Korova Multimedia Post Office Box 2036 Novato, CA 94948 CompuServe 70713,1440 Music/Arts Forum, RockNet America Online DSpalding RockNet The Microsoft Network DSpalding RockNet The Digital Dream (UK) http://www.bath.ac.uk/~su9urb/jt/korova/index.html \|/|\|/|\|/|\|/|\|/|\|/|\|/|\|/|\|/|\|/|\|/|\|/|\|/|\|/|\|/|\|/|\|/|\|/|\|/ 8/29/95 OUTBREAK, Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman, Donald Sutherland, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Kevin Spaey, Dir. by Wolfgang Petersen (Warner 13632; 128:00), 1994. "There is a fire." With those words, a chain of events begins as a biological crisis snowballs into international proportions. An unknown virus with 100% lethality invades a small, American community, and it's up to government agencies and brilliant super-doctors to find a cure. While the medical sleuths are trying to figure out what it is, how it spreads and how it can be stopped, the plague spreads like wildfire, threatening the human race with complete and utter annihilation. The only solution, unless the medicos can find an answer, is (that good ol' Fifties sci-fi clean sweep) Drop The Bomb. Sounds familiar? Say, like the Dustin Hoffman hit that's recently been released on video? Actually,... it's the premise of Michael Crichton's THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN and the masterful film adaptation directed by Robert Wise. Similarities can be drawn to Elia Kazan's 1950 film, PANIC IN THE STREETS, and even MGM's space opera classic, FORBIDDEN PLANET, in which an unseen monster begins killing off a crew of space explorers; other stories by George Romero and Stephen King have also portrayed idle America as the viruses' playground. Though the bug itself has been updated from a crystalline- based organism from outer space to a mutating virus from Zaire (and the carrier is now a hapless, little monkey), the essential elements of Crichton's prophecy remain in place. The viruses that we face today (AIDS among them) pose one of the most profound threats to our existence on this orb; some even feel that our expanding population and violent encroachment on remaining frontiers make us a likely target as hosts for newer, stranger critters. Ready to defend us from this dire threat are the best virologists who ever fired up an atomic microscope, Army Colonel Sam Daniels (Hoffman), and his newly-ex-wife (Rene Russo), now working for the Centers for Disease Control. Both command a dizzying arsenal of technology and specialists; once again, high technology and Federal interconnectivity are our only hope. When the virus descends upon in a Northern California community, both agencies spring into action, sealing the town off in a military quarantine and setting up shop with more clinical goodies than St. Elsewhere ever dreamt of. Screenwriters Laurence Dworet and Robert Roy Pool enlarge on the initial horror of ANDROMEDA, by focusing on the most familiar of the story's settings: the little Western town that is instantly decimated by the virus. Wise's eerie depiction of a small populace cut down in mid-stride is unforgettable, a portrait of how truly fragile our world is. Here, Wolfgang Petersen zeroes in on the likely pandemonium when an entire town starts catching the "super flu," and squirms under a likely death sentence. Adding to this conventional suspense line is a subtext of duplicitous overseers intent on protecting the national security interests in maintaining a stockpile of superior biochemical weapons, and eliminating both the threat of a national plague and disclosure of the top secret capabilities ... at any cost. Our hero, of course, is intent only on curing the immediate ills ... at any cost. As a terse, rather unsociable career man, Hoffman bristles with clinical, birdlike intensity (his own pace sets this film's pace). His one aim: find the bug ... and kill it. Trained to launch anywhere in the world at a moment's notice when one of these critters crops up, he's right at home when the jungles of the Motaba River Basin infect Cedar Creek, California. We see the effect early on in the film, when a small town is entirely wiped out by the disease -- everyone dead, corpses and fires everywhere. COL Daniels is on the case, ready to chase the virus to the brink of death. Gorgeous photography of the wilderness surrounding Humboldt County illustrates that we're surrounded by nature, at its mercy; the death-spirit of the Zaire jungle town travels to California. In present day Motaba, we see clear foreshadowing of what could happen here ... and OUTBREAK really finds its stride in portraying a Third World medical disaster in our own backyard. Cedar Creek becomes a military zone a la Ethiopia, with a foreign virus violating the sterile blandness of middle America, and American citizens afforded increasingly less compassion. In the face of a true outbreak of plague, our value as individuals is displaced by our significance as a statistic. Just as Stephen King did in THE STAND, Petersen gives plenty of attention to the certain mayhem and hysteria that results when an entire community is upended by an unknown invader. The filmmakers do a superb job, giving us a glimpse of this horror under the guise of an entertaining suspense film. Though this flick is chock full of digital effects, fancy lab gear and isolation suits right out of 2001, the nature of the story (and the storytelling) bases the weight of the film on the human element. The cast is excellent, standing out from all the sterile props and settings. Hoffman and his lieutenants (Kevin Spacey and Cuba Gooding, Jr.) vibrate with drive and passion, while Donald Sutherland and Morgan Freeman glide through as upper bureaucrats. Given the topicality of the featured menace, OUTBREAK gives more than just a lingering chill. -- D.B. Spalding (C) Copyright 1995 D.B. Spalding. All rights reserved. Please send e-mail for licensing information. A self-described multicareerist, D.B. Spalding is a writer, musician, independent radio producer, computer consultant and online sysop; he writes frequently about music, film, computing and the mass- and multimedia.