Carriers --- Viral Pandemic? Who Cares, Let's Hit The Beach

Carriers is a film that focuses on the journey of four people that are trying to find safety in a world that has been victimized and ravaged by an avian flu like virus that has wiped out most of humanity. Two brothers, Brian (Chris Pine) and Danny (Lou Taylor Pucci) and their female companions Bobby (Piper Perabo) and Kate (Emily Van Camp) set out to go on a cross country road trip to Turtle Beach, because hell, if you gotta die, you might as well die somewhere that you've had some good times. That's their line of thought anyway.

We all know that if the trip went according to plan, we wouldn't have a movie, so get ready for 84 minutes of a cliched character study that's chock full of identity issues. This is a movie that just doesn't know what it wants to be. Issues are raised right from the very beginning of the movie. When people go to the movie theater, there's a good chance they've seen the trailer before they see the movie. When people rent movies there's a good chance they've either seen the trailer, or at the very least looked at the box art before popping the DVD into their DVD player. The cover of the DVD Box to Carriers showed the four main characters decked out in their rubber gloves and facemasks to prevent themselves from being infected by the pathogen. Clearly coming into this movie, we had some idea of what were going to see. So why start us out with a five minute scene that's trying to get us to think they're on their way to some Spring Break beach party? It was a scene that was completely useless, unless you were to randomly stumble across it on HBO without knowing what you were watching.

From there we really, really lose any sense of direction as the cliches really start to roll in. If you go into your friendly neighborhood Blockbuster and go to the Horror/Thriller section, how many movies do you think you can pick up that have a line similar to "But as they embark on their journey, they realize that the only thing to fear more than the virus is themselves". If every movie tries to provide us with the commentary that humans are quick to turn evil when put in a situation where their survival is threatened, what are they really telling us? Nothing. It went from being a valid, intelligent and horrifying commentary in movies like Night of the Living Dead to a cliched staple of every zombie/infection movie that gets churned out anymore.

But for now, back to the identity crisis this movie clearly has. It's not cerebral enough to make you think. It's not thrilling enough to be a thriller. And it's certainly not scary enough in anyway to be a bonafide horror movie. I will say that there is a lot of dramatic tension in this movie, but whenever it starts to get really tense, they cut to a montage that tries to break the tension. Brian almost falls into a pool with a rotting infected corpse floating in it, which would mean certain death, but he gets rescued and... then they decide to go whack some golf balls at the hotel that they've set up temporary residence in. A little earlier in the film, another tense scene is followed up with Brian riding around a golf course in a golf cart before flipping it into a ditch, which is fitting, because whenever this movie really seems to get rolling in the right direction, it drives off the road and into a ditch.

Another big issue that I had with this movie was that it really didn't have an apocalyptic atmosphere to it. Everything looked far too neat, clean and sterilized. There weren't abandoned cars strewn every which way, and absolutely no evidence of looting or rioting anywhere. Their pandemic stricken society looked like what you or I might see if we were to drive through a quaint, sleepy town on an early Sunday morning. In fact, even when they get to the town where a supposed serum is being worked on, the streets are ENTIRELY empty. There's not a car parked anywhere, nevermind driving by. There aren't withering corpses in the streets, or infected people lying around. There's just nothing. This didn't look like what you would see in the case of a global pandemic. It looked like something you might see in something like Stephen King's The Langoliers. It looked like the world was devoid of everything.

The film did have some merits though. The performances were good. Actually, the performances were waaaaaaay too good. As the film goes on, Chris Pine plays his loose cannon role to perfection. Piper Perabo is eternally likable, especially in the early parts of the movie when she bonds with an infected girl. But bar none, the best performance of the movie belongs to Christopher Meloni of Law & Order fame. This dude can act. His performance as a father trying to get his infected daughter a serum that will cure her is absolutely brilliant. His final scene of the movie is absolutely heartwrenching (and that's from someone who's been accused of having a heart of stone).

So in the end, the acting saved this movie from being a complete clunker. They say you should never judge a book (or movie in this case) by it's cover. But the judgment I made when I saw the cover to this movie was that it couldn't be any good if it was putting quotes from the Phoenix Examiner on the front. I'm sorry Phoenix Examiner, but this movie did not provide "Extreme Excitement". I guess every once in a while it's okay to judge a movie by it's cover.

Rating: 3 out of 10 Flu Spreading Birds