Outbreak

Wolfgang Petersen, who kept a submarine crew in a steel tube for the whole of Das Boot (1981), here lets loose a fever that kills in days and sends the United States Army after it. Outbreak is two films. The first is a tight, frightening thriller about how a disease travels and who decides what to tell the public. The second is a chase, and the chase wins. It is still worth an evening, mostly for the hour in which the virus is the star.

It opens in 1967, in a mercenary camp in the Motaba River Valley in Zaire, where men are dying with blood in their eyes and the American officers who come to help leave and then bomb the place flat. Twenty-eight years later Colonel Sam Daniels (Dustin Hoffman), an army virologist, is sent to a village in the same valley and finds the same thing. Michael Ballhaus shoots the village in dust and amber: bodies under sheets, flies, and a single doctor, Benjamin Iwabi (Zakes Mokae), who has seen this before and tells Daniels so without raising his voice. Daniels’s boss, General Billy Ford (Morgan Freeman), orders him to leave it alone. Then a smuggled monkey reaches California.

The best sequence in the film is set in a small-town cinema. A man with the fever laughs at the screen and coughs, and Ballhaus follows the spray in slow motion through the projector beam until it drifts down into the open mouth of a woman in the row behind. We watched it with a hand over our own mouth, and we were still thinking about it on a crowded train a week later. Nothing else in the film frightens like it. Petersen then has the town, Cedar Creek, sealed off by soldiers, and the scenes of families talking through plastic sheeting and parents kept from their children at a roadblock are quiet, well staged and horrible.

William Sandell builds the army’s laboratory as a run of airlocks and glass walls, and Erica Edell Phillips puts the scientists in blue pressure suits with a hose hanging from the back, so that every conversation inside is shouted and slightly late. Hoffman is at his best in these rooms. He is small, quick and argumentative, and he plays Daniels as a man who knows he is right and knows nobody wants to hear it. Kevin Spacey’s Casey Schuler stands beside him being drily funny, and Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Major Salt looks as if he might be sick inside his helmet and then is not. Freeman gives Ford a tiredness that tells us more about the chain of command than any line of dialogue does. Donald Sutherland’s General McClintock snarls at everyone from his first scene, which rather gives away what the film thinks of him.

Rene Russo plays Robby Keough, Daniels’s ex-wife, who has left for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and the script by Robert Roy Pool and Laurence Dworet asks the divorce to carry the film’s heart. It cannot. Their scenes are a couple of arguments about who keeps the dogs and a lot of looking at each other through glass, and Russo, who is sharp whenever the writing lets her be, is given a woman defined by what she is not doing with her husband. The dialogue elsewhere is of the kind in which people announce their jobs to each other.

Then the helicopters arrive. The last forty minutes send Hoffman into the air after a monkey and some generals, and a man who is persuasive at a microscope is not persuasive hanging out of a door at a thousand feet. Four editors are credited, Stephen E. Rivkin, Neil Travis, Lynzee Klingman and William Hoy, and the final stretch looks as if it was cut by all of them in separate rooms. James Newton Howard’s score, which had been content to tick quietly under the laboratory scenes, hits the drums every time a rotor turns. By the second helicopter we were bored, and then cross about it, because the film had already shown us it could frighten us with a cough.

The Andromeda Strain (1971) spent its whole length in one laboratory and did not need a single explosion. Outbreak has the same material and stops trusting it after the hour mark. See it for that hour, for the cinema scene, and for Hoffman and Freeman in their suits, and feel free to make the tea once the rotors start. It runs 129 minutes and carries a 15 certificate.