‘Viruses’ on the Big Screen Movies about Pandemics – Ceylon Daily News

Movies about pandemics can generally be classified along three lines: the origins of the virus, the fate of the characters, and the ending. Given its bent towards big budgets and box-office expectations, the American cinema does not indulge in explanations: it divesstraight into the action. Thus we get to the how, why, and wherefore of the pandemic later; until then, what matters is the action, the fate of the characters in whom the studios invest so much attention. In certain movies, we forget the appeal of the actors, so were transfixed by the story: Contagion is the most obvious example, where not even the star status commanded by the cast can immunise them from the disease. But being the rare exception, as all exceptions are, American movies about viruses and contagions prefer to take up the action rather than get us to think about the virus thats driving the action.

Debatable origins

Its debatable when and how pandemic movies originated. None of the big outbreaks in the early 20th century influenza, cholera, smallpox motivated directors to make films about them. On the other hand, there was a symbiotic relationship between the way global politics was being shaped and the evolution of another related genre: science fiction. As Susan Sontag aptly pointed out in her essay The imagination of disaster, there are subtle interrelationships between the sci-fi thriller and the disaster film on the one hand and between the vampire film and the sci-fi thriller on the other. It may seem confusing, yet its true, particular of sci-fi and end-of-the-world movies where destruction and annihilation come not through alien invasions, but invasions from within: think of 1956s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where pods from outer space we are never told where they originate replicate humans when they come into contact with them, depriving them of emotions, feelings, the capacity to love and to hate. Here you see a slight link with the vampire thriller, where one bite can deprive a character of his or her humanity. Epidemic movies started to evolve at this point.

If the sci-fi-disaster film owes its genesis to vampire flicks the Bela Lugosi and the Christopher Lee Dracula series the epidemic film owes its genesis to the zombie thriller. The pioneer of that genre is George Romero, and his Night of the Living Dead (1968) remade and parodied so many times, even by him but a better film, that shows the connection between the walking undead, as zombies are referred to as today, and the virus and the epidemic, is 1973s The Crazies, also by Romero, where the residents of a town in Pennsylvania suddenly go berserk and resort to horrendous acts of violence. A box-office failure at the time, The Crazies set the stage for the development of the genre, though it had been preceded five years before by another sci-fi disaster thriller which showed the impact of a virus on the human race: Planet of the Apes.

The Andromeda Strain

In the early years, movies about viruses didnt bother too much about the science behind the viruses. The one exception to this was The Andromeda Strain (1971), where a group of scientists, seemingly randomly chosen by the government, is ordered to an underground facility where they conduct tests on a virus from outer space, an extraterrestrial form of life that latches itself onto a satellite and, on earth, causes rapid clotting of the blood in all those who come near it, except those with a condition the film (as is the case with all such revelations in American films) reveals only at the end. The movie spends more time with the relationships between the scientists, and since we are underground for about two-thirds of the story, we dont get to see the effects of the virus out there: only the tests, the quibbling among the characters, and the race against time as an outbreak of the virus in the facility triggers an alarm which in turn starts the timer on a detonator.

The Andromeda Strain does its best to stick to science its based on a Michael Crichton novel but there are moments when it too overlooks scientific accuracy. Still, its more accurate than half the disaster-epidemic-zombie thrillers that came out in the 70s, most of them low budget box-office hits rather than expensive blockbusters. In The Omega Man, which belongs to the latter category and was released the same year as Andromeda, Charlton Heston is the last man on earth thats been flattened by a virus we barely hear about. The Omega Man was remade in 2007 with Will Smith and a German Shepherd: I Am Legend. But since movies are best viewed in the context of their time, the story-lines in the original and the remake, though superficially similar, are thematically different: Heston lives in a world shifting between two superpowers the Cold War while Smith lives in a world that has substituted microbes and viruses for nuclear bombs biological warfare.

The folly of scientists

I mentioned earlier, without offering any explanation, that politics shaped the evolution of the sci-fi and disaster movie. This is also true of pandemic movies. Its tempting to see in the conflict between the two superpowers the West and the Iron Curtain the possibility of a lab-originated virus from one side that escapes and spreads to a large population on the other side. But none of the epidemic-themed films lays the blame solely on politics; as Planet of the Apes aptly shows, man ultimately has to bear the responsibility for his own destruction: he subjects animals to degrading experiments, and when one life-form mutates to another and a virus is born, he inadvertently holds the seeds of his own destruction. This theme is carried forward, and explored with greater depth, in Rise of the Planet of the Apes and its sequels. The message we get is simple: politics compels warfare, but in the end its man who, spurred by an insatiable thirst to conquer the world around him, lets off a chain of events that culminate in the extinction of his own race. Its what H. G. Welles wrote of: the folly of scientists who think they can triumph over nature.

Natures revenge

In the end, its natures revenge on mankinds selfishness: the old, familiar theme from sci-fi films of the 1950s where aliens make use of the flaws of human beings to try and conquer them. On the other hand, while humans are responsible for their own destruction and politics is never solely blamed for the pandemic, the latter is a cause too. Politicians were, of course, the villains of many sci-fi disaster films: think of The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Day the Earth Caught Fire, separated by 10 years between them but delving into the same basic theme, the process of destruction that man initiates by his inexorable desire to conquer the other side, or the other superpower. Curiously, the first epidemic films dont single out politicians in The Crazies they are depicted as benign and kindly, while in Andromeda they are more accurate than the scientists in the predictions they make but as the years go by, we see distrust with big government feature as a big theme.

The remakes of these films bear this out. In both The Omega Man and I Am Legend, the hero, the last man standing, is an army colonel and military doctor. Butthe first film lays emphasis on his military background, while the second does so on his medical background. Between the one and the other, the hero, like the virus,has mutated, from the military to the medical profession. Again, these reflect the context of their time: the Cold War, when the army was valorised, and post-9/11, when professionals especially in the scientific and medical fields took over the role of hero, and the military was, owing to a decade or so of incessant adventurist wars abroad, viewed with suspicion by the American public. The politicians dont get off the hook either: in the 2010 remake of The Crazies, it is the military, and with it the military-medical officials, who turn out to be the villains, when its revealed that they had accidentally released the virus which turned everyone in the city violent. Even when they step in to correct the mistake, they are depicted as inept buffoons: in one sequence, they take away and isolate residents having an abnormal temperature, and among those they take is the heros wife, who has an abnormal temperature not because shes infected, but because shes pregnant.

Contagion

The gulf between government/military officials bureaucratic, apathetic, indifferent, self-serving and medical professions swift, heroic, sensitive, selfless comes out vividly in recent epidemic-themed films. The best example, of course, is Contagion (2011), but a starker example is Wolfgang Petersens Outbreak(1995), where the military doctor, played by Dustin Hoffman, has to literally find a cure within hours, even while a conspiracy in the army is brewing against him; a scheming general, played by Donald Sutherland, is the villain, while the almost-villain-rooting-for-the-hero happens to be another military official, played by Morgan Freeman.

In Contagion the military doesnt interfere with the scientists that way, but government officials, who feign ignorance and (worse) indifference at the findings of the scientists, get more worried about the costs of maintaining quarantine centres. On the other hand, the scientific officials themselves arent shown as angelic: one official from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), played by Laurence Fishburne, calls his wife and, breaching all protocol, leaks to her news about the virus spreading and urges her to get out. A janitor who overhears the conversation berates him; later, they are reconciled.

Other movies from this period offer variations on these basic plot lines, be they about an outbreak of a virus or an outbreak of zombies. The rule in general is that in films about zombies, you never get to hear about the origins of the virus. Not even in The Crazies, where the hero almost gets a confession out of a military official before his deputy shoots his head off. We instead enjoy vampire-like un-dead cannibals devouring innocents; not for one moment are we made to ponder on how they turned into such creatures, not even in as intelligently conceived a story as Train to Busan. At one level that is only to be expected: the scriptwriters and directors dont want the story to deviate from the action by giving us even a minute to reflect on why this is happening. To contemplate on the origins of the virus that turns us all into monsters would be, in their order of things, a waste of time. The blood and the gore, the bite marks and the transformations, are hence enough.

Often, pandemic themed thrillers give its directors a chance to critique the hierarchies of power that exist in their societies. In American zombie and pandemic thrillers, its often the military that gets a drubbing, if not the bureaucracy, but outside the US, directors pick on other villains. In Busan, the villain at the end is the elderly businessman, concerned only about himself even when he gets bitten.

We feel tempted to treat the young executive, who teams up with his daughter and some of the other passengers on the train, as a hero, but hes not: had the outbreak not happened, and had things gone as normally as they had before the outbreak, he would have sooner or later turned into the rapacious, selfish, greedy businessman who he has to fight with at the end. Even without the zombies, he was transforming, into what his society expects him to transform into. This is a critique of structures of power and authority that we saw in Parasite. Is it thus not more than a coincidence that the very title of the latter film, which has nothing to do with a virus, should bring up associations with outbreaks and contagions? Perhaps a zombie pandemic thriller is what we need to explore the complexities, and the hierarchies, at the heart of our world.

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'Viruses' on the Big Screen Movies about Pandemics - Ceylon Daily News

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero