#Film semi lies 1998 movie

Rewatching Outbreak, though, the scene I found most striking was one I’d managed to forget about entirely: the one in which two families, mutinous and angry, try to escape the military-imposed quarantine that has been enacted around the picturesque coastal town of Cedar Creek, California, in an effort to keep the virus contained.

#Film semi lies 1998 movie

(Part of what made that scene stay with me, I assume, is that I saw it as it was intended to be witnessed: in a movie theater.) And I remembered the film’s visualization of the virus as it spreads through a crowded movie theater: the particles, imperceptible and deadly, traveling-dancing, almost-from the mouth of an infected man into the body of a woman who has opened her mouth to laugh at the comedy on-screen.

I remembered the moment when Robby (Rene Russo) pricks herself with an infected needle through the layers of her protective suit: how her expression melts from frenzied panic to dull horror as she removes her gloves to see her own tainted blood. I remembered, especially, the horrific manifestations of the film’s semi-fictional disease (a form of hemorrhagic fever whose symptoms are very similar to those of Ebola): the sores, the sweat, the way it caused people to bleed from their eyes. In some ways, I didn’t need to rewatch Outbreak: Several of its scenes have been seared in my mind for years. It understands that, in America, one of the biggest threats to public health can be American culture itself. Outbreak gets a lot wrong, but it gets one of the broadest things right. But the film’s utter lack of nuance is itself revealing: Its bluntness manages to capture some of the extreme contradictions of this moment-a situation some are treating as an emergency and others are treating as a Monday. For a movie whose subject is epidemiology, Outbreak features a shocking number of explosions: Its genre, fundamentally and unapologetically, is Action. Wolfgang Petersen’s film, which premiered in 1995 and shows its age, is not a subtle movie, or even a terribly thoughtful one. But then I thought about Outbreak, which takes on similar ideas (a viral contagion, an invisible threat) from a decidedly less cerebral point of view. I thought briefly about Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film about a disconcertingly coronavirus–like virus-and an exploration of how thin the line can be between the apocalyptic and the banal. Looking at the pictures this weekend, I thought back, as so many others have, to the movies I’ve been turning to lately for catharsis during the crisis. Dancing-or in this case, drinking green-tinted beer-as the world burns.

Disease, passed to the vulnerable by those who might assume themselves invincible.

Whether the individuals in the pictures didn’t know about the grave dangers they were posing by gathering-dangers not necessarily to themselves, but to other people-or whether their fun was more expressly rebellious, the effect was the same: a global pandemic, made steadily more threatening because it is steadily more difficult to contain. People packed into bars, for standard weekend celebrations or Saint Patrick’s Day parties. Over the weekend, images spread around social media: people crowded together at brunch, drinking mimosas in oblivious or defiant revelry.