“Rage” is the virus. It collects victims quickly and regenerates them suddenly like zombies, except they move much faster. When our protagonist awakes from his 28 day coma, London is a wasteland, the few who have survived with human traits still intact are roaming guerrilla factions. The population of London hasn’t disappeared, though. They’re running at the camera in growling, blood-thirsty crowds. Danny Boyle’s 2002 film is a hand-held, heart-quickening thriller. Realism prevails throughout; what do humans do to each other to survive? What happens when martial law takes place, without any real orders from above? What does it mean to be inflicted with the “rage virus,” anyways?
A cautionary tale against McCarthyism? A red alert of paranoiac proportions regarding Communism? It’s not so clear cut, but the 1956 film is potent with a Cold War hysteria, the struggle to remain an individual while everyone else is exactly…the…same. Indeed, the epidemic is that: soullessness. A weighty, dreadfully paced film which shattered the small town, post-war Americana landscape, it’s still as intense and watchable today.
Steve Martin, Richard Gere, Anjelica Huston, Lily Tomlin, and Matthew Modine lead a very talented cast of characters who are at the receiving end of a mysterious new illness which seems to be plaguing American’s gay community: they call it the HIV virus. A landmark 1993 cable drama which shows the multiple layers of the millions quickly affected by the viral outbreak: the scientists, working tirelessly to find out what is exactly happening, and the people affected on the ground level, especially the marginalized gay communities of the 1980s. The confusion and fear which swept across the world during that crucial time is palpably felt in this very important film.
The dystopic near-future of our world is a result of infertility; at the beginning of the film, the youngest person alive, 18-years-old dies, and two seconds later a bomb explodes in the London street. Whatever mysterious disease did this to women has destroyed any democratic society in the world, and England is secured from the outside apocalypse by a frightening police state. The heroes and villains of this remarkable film starring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore are driven by their need to preserve reproduction, to protect new beginnings while everything around them is aging to extinction.
The government has biological weapons, yet the government will step in to prevent biological terrorism. This very real circle drawn around all of our lives is covered in this 1973 horror film by George “Night of the Living Dead” Romero. A military plane crash lands near a Pennsylvania town, and the untested chemical weapon on board leaks a virus called “Trixie,” which starts to violently affect the small population. U.S. troops invade and react senselessly to a chaotic situation, and the hijinks continue.
While very much a Hollywood baby of the mid-90’s American blockbuster cinema, “Outbreak” still contains some very realistic cause-and-effect scenarios. Released in 1995 during the middle of some real-time Ebola outbreaks in Africa, it creates a similar virus called “Motaba,” which resurfaces 28 years later in Zaire after being first discovered by two American military officers in the jungle. Meanwhile, a monkey named Betty makes her way to the States, and the disaster beings. A predecessor to the much more clinical, less sensationalized “Contagion” (read on), it’s meant to thrill and shock while also introducing us to the scientists and disease control agents who are certainly not from a fictional world.
It is the Middle Ages in Europe. The Black Death is sweeping across the land, a plague so catastrophic that within a matter of seven years (1346-53), it will wipe out 200 million Europeans, virtually one third of the continent. In Ingmar Bergman’s stark 1957 masterpiece, a knight has returned from the crusades to face the threat of his extinction, and all of humankind’s. He seeks redemption from God, but only finds silence. He confronts Death, literally, a figure in a dark cloak, and on the beach they have their famous chess match. If and when this does happen to the world, it may come down to how Bergman painted it: to the bare and dark questions of existence, of why we are here anyways, of our human fragility in the face of calamities we will never be able to control.
A space shuttle returns to Earth, and suddenly most of the citizens of a small town in Arizona fall dead from an alien (literally) virus. Some of them suffer from mysterious and sudden blood clots, and a few of them go mad and commit suicide. When scientists contain the extraterrestrial strain, they find it can mutate into different biological forms. Horror! The 1971 film based on Michael Crichton’s massively successful novel is a wide shot as to ever becoming a real-time situation on our planet, but provokes questions about deep space. How much do we think about how irrelevant we are in the scope of it, and what exists out there that could nonchalantly wipe out an entire species?
A sci-fi delve into disturbia which inches on classic with every year since its 1995 release, and the first hints of Brad Pitt as a substantial actor, this Terry Gilliam-directed story opens in 2035 Philadelphia, where only one percent of the world’s population is alive and hiding underground after a mysterious virus ravages the planet. Bruce Willis is sent back in time to discover the disease’s origins, thought to have been released for bio-chemical terrorism reasons by the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. While the viral outbreak may just be a backdrop for the psychedelic, nightmarish futurescape depicted in the film, let’s all hope time machines are already household by the time a disease this uncontainable comes along.
We knew it from her breakout performance in “Emma,” that Gwyneth Paltrow would be the harbinger of the apocalypse. Perhaps the most clinical, precise, and grounded film ever made about a disease outbreak, Steven Soderbergh’s superb screenplay and direction usher a cast with the likes of Matt Damon and Jude Law through a global epidemic. From Hong Kong to Minneapolis, San Francisco to London, scientists and pedestrians alike are puzzled, frightened, and inflicted. A great film, especially displaying the international response team of scientists and medical experts who have in the past contained some viruses which otherwise would have spread like a firestorm. These brave people are real, and may be our future’s salvation.
