Carriers (2009)

Carriers is no boundary-pusher. It's not the most unique concept, its writing isn't stellar, its young adult actors aren't prodigies, its soundtrack won't move you, and the cinematography isn't outrageous. It's simply decent. After watching it my main thought was "at least it wasn't another zombie movie." If you're tired of summer blockbusters (and I mean, who wouldn't be?) throw this on to kill an hour or two.

This movie is actually, like a classic Greek tragedy. People are put into impossible situations, where whatever choices they make, are going to lead to crushing sorrow. I am surprised, that many commentors , don't seem to be emotionally affected by this film. That to me is very sad and chilling. Have the plethora of disaster films in recent years, inured us to the pain of our fellow humans; the irresponsible violence, which permeates both our imaginary world and our reality ? This movie was basically about the relationship between life (survival) and the quality of life (love and brotherhood). I thought it was very well done, emotionally powerful. Thank you to all involved.

I'm a huge fan of post-apocalypse movies, so CARRIERS was a given: a deadly airborne virus, a car full of survivors struggling to survive in a desperate and lonely world…yada yada yada, let's get moving with it. Unfortunately for me, Carriers turns out to be dead in the water. It's a soulless, pointless, plot less little exercise in human drama that offers nothing new and goes absolutely nowhere with it.It does start off mildly interesting, as our protagonists (four twentysomething friends) stumble across a father caring for his infected daughter. There are genuine moments of tension along the way with this sub-plot, and you watch wondering how things turn out. Sadly, this plot is jettisoned after a time, and the storyline develops no further. Instead, the film seems content to dwell on listless moments of inanity. The characters sit around drinking or knock golf balls through windows (Fight Club this ain't). They argue, have sex, and have a run-in with some completely generic guys-in-biohazard-suits who seem to show up in every film like this. It all ends in an overblown, mountain-out-of-a-molehill climax that seems to think it's powerfully shocking when, in fact, it's quite simply passé.It seems that American films have lately got stuck in a rut, casting their movies with obnoxious characters (I'm thinking of CHRONICLE) who spoil what have the potential to be otherwise good movies. Certainly, Chris Pine is one of the most unappealing leads I've seen in a while (he acts as pretty much the same type of one-dimensional hot-headed jerk that he played in STAR TREK) and the rest barely get a look in; Emily Van Camp, who might well be the best actor present, has about all of ten lines to contend with.Like I said, I love post-apocalypse movies…but this non-starter is nothing more than a test of patience.

Most films, especially genre pictures like horror or suspense, are initially strong and then fade a bit as they go along. Pretty much every aspiring screenwriter and director gets hammered into them the importance of grabbing the audience right away, though few are capable of sustaining that attraction through an entire story. Carriers is the exact opposite. This thing actually gets a bit better as it goes along. Unfortunately, it has one of the weakest and most dramatically ill-conceived beginnings I've ever seen. This movie opens up by completely emasculating its own premise and spends the rest of its time on screen struggling to overcome that crippling mistake. And since this is a PG-13 horror/suspense flick, it doesn't have nearly the amount of violence, nudity and other provocative material to get the job done.The plot concerns a quartet of young people driving through the country in the wake of a disease outbreak that has all but destroyed civilization. Brian and Danny (Chris Pike and Lou Taylor Pucci) are brothers. Brian is the older bro and is sort of the high school jock a few years after graduation who hasn't quite realized his best days are behind him. Danny is the younger, smarter brother who's always played second fiddle to his more assertive sibling. They're joined by Brian's girlfriend Bobbi (Piper Perabo) and Kate (Emily VanCamp), a girl who knows Danny but the two of them are not together. They're traveling to a beachside hotel Brian and Danny's family visited in the past, now long abandoned, and hope to set up camp there and stay alive until the outbreak ends. As you might expect, they run into other folks along the way that complicate those plans and find that avoiding infection is harder than they thought.Now, I want to emphasize that Carriers is not a bad little film when taken as a whole. It's fairly clichéd but those clichés are well utilized and it throws a few new wrinkles into the mix. For example, Brian and company live by a set of rules. Avoid the infected, disinfect anything they've touched and you can't save the sick because they're already dead. They wear surgical masks and rubber gloves and always have bleach at the ready. Then they encounter another band of survivors who've taken it to the extreme of always wearing full-on gas masks and home made haz-mat suit and it's interesting to compare and contrast the level of fear and social disintegration between the two groups. Chris Pine and Christopher Meloni, as the father of an infected girl, also do very good work conveying the inner struggle of what it's like to be the guy who has to try and keep it all together when the world is falling apart.I'm not sure any of that ultimately matters because Carriers comes damn close to ruining itself within the first 15 minutes. Brian and company encounter the aforementioned father and infected girl on the road. To that point, the audience hasn't seen any bodies or heard any terrible stories of the outbreak. This is the moment in the story where the amount of physical danger is supposed to be established and, by extension, the level or moral and ethical pressure facing all these characters. This is the scene that sets the stakes and asks the audience to consider what they would do in such dire circumstances. So, what do Brian and company do with the father and his infected daughter? They let them hitch a ride in the back of an SUV with only a thin layer of plastic and duct tape separating Brian, Danny, Bobbi and Kate from certain death.Really? Millions, possibly billions of people are dead from disease that's very easy to catch and is 100% lethal. The crisis is so severe that basic government functions have ceased and the world has become a jungle of all against all. And in that situation, rather than take more conclusive action to protect yourself, you rely on a plastic sheeting and duct tape, risking miserable death just to be kind to a couple of strangers. Really?I'm sure writer/directors Alex and David Pastor could provide a reason for why they started their movie like that and how it fits into the rest of the plot, but it doesn't matter what they intended. What they did, in fact, was to fatally undermine and defang the threat that is at the core of their story. Instead of the disease being a civilization-ending catastrophe, it's presented to the viewer as a bad case of measles or the mumps. It's something you don't want to get but nothing so virulent that it justifies extreme action to protect yourself. Even if you don't want to crank the Drama-o-meter up to 11 right away and leave yourself nowhere to go after that, you also can't turn it all the way down to zero and leave the audience wondering what the big deal is supposed to be. The rest of Carriers does an okay job of trying to crawl out from under such a glaring and massive error. I'm not sure anyone who watches is going to care.Without such disastrous storytelling at the opening, I would have said this film was worth watching. However, the rest of it isn't good enough that I can honestly recommend something with such a self-negating start.