Number 19 — OUTBREAK
For the month of October, we’re counting down the best horror movies of 1995! Check back every day for a new entry in the list.
Primates were having A Moment in the mid-’90s. In 1994, we got MONKEY TROUBLE and DONKEY KONG COUNTRY. In 1996, we got ED, DUNSTON CHECKS IN, and Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys. And in 1995, we got that other Arnold Kopelson production with striking deaths that starred Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey. In 1995, we got OUTBREAK.
OUTBREAK, which momentarily did for Capuchin monkeys what JAWS still does for great white sharks, was written by Laurence Dworet (MD) and Robert Roy Pool, and directed by Wolfgang Petersen. It also knocked Lynda Obst’s adaptation of Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone into development hell; she got the last laugh when it was adapted into a miniseries in 2019. The long and short of OUTBREAK is that it’s a showcase of Man vs. Nature, and of popcorn logic. Lots of smart people made stupid decisions up and down the runtime, but the movie made $189,900,000 in theatres… so a good time didn’t need to care about intellect.
Characters made bad decisions in ALIEN, but you could shrug them off since they were space truckers. PROMETHEUS, however, was full of scientists, so every bad decision could only be met with “...wut?” OUTBREAK has a few Promethean bungles. Here’s a taste: the Motaba virus carried by the stolen Capuchin monkey was transmitted through blood. A centrifuge is that spinning machine doctors put vials in to separate blood from plasma. What shouldn’t a doctor do with a centrifuge full of Motaba-carrying blood samples? If you answered, “stick your hand in it”, you’d be smarter than the medical professional during the viral spread montage. Bonus points if you wondered why said doctor didn’t test himself for anything after getting splattered by his sanguined idiocy.
Something that wasn’t a bungle as much as it was creepy was the relationship between Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo’s characters. They’re divorced, but he takes every opportunity to use the outbreak as a way to patch up their marriage. I blame DIE HARD, or rather, people learning the wrong lesson from DIE HARD. John McClane went to Nakatomi Plaza to salvage his marriage to Holly, Hans Gruber crashed the party for some bearer bonds, and John accidentally reconnected with Holly after dropping Hans out a window. What Hoffman’s character did would’ve been the equivalent of John leaving love-you notes to Holly on the goons he killed.
Another Promethean bungle comes from your Average Jane. I would like, if I may, to set the stage. You love someone in the fierce “they’re the only one that matters” fashion, and you meet them in the airport after their trip. You’ve got Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” playing in your head since you walked through the automatic doors. You’ve got that burning, burning yearning for sideways things, which gets stronger as you see them ambling towards the loading gate. You see them, they see you, and they look sick. Really sick. Like Jeff Goldblum on the cusp of Brundlefly. I don’t know about you, but I’d get them help, not make out with them like I’m fishing for their uvula. Well… unless it was Shelly from the Double R.
There’s a better movie in OUTBREAK; some would say it’s Steven Soderbergh’s CONTAGION. What gets lost in OUTBREAK is that a government would rather blow up a town and figure out a way to wield a deadly virus than create a cure for it. Oh, and they already had a decades-old cure for one of the two strains the monkey had but didn’t use it for...reasons. Actually, the town did get bombed with an ending that would’ve felt at home in the ‘70s—but test screenings made the studio change it. Kopelson, whether he wanted it or not, would keep the bleak ending in his other Freeman/Spacey ‘95 production. And we thank him for it with every questionable box.
Despite the foolish desire for timelessness, every piece of art is a product of its time. A glaring bit of the ’90s in OUTBREAK was the helicopter chase that was shoehorned near the end. The stunt pilots did a phenomenal job with the conception and execution, but it’s clear someone at the studio thought a town being the finish line of a bombing run wasn’t exciting enough. Helicopter chases were the “needs more cowbell” of the ‘90s. Another taste of the end of the century was when a village was bombed early in the movie, which looked suspiciously like Sarah’s nuclear nightmare from TERMINATOR 2. One last bit was the long take through the research facility. It’s like Wolfgang Petersen realized he had Michael Ballhaus as his cinematographer and wanted him to use some of that Copacabana magic from GOODFELLAS. If Petersen watched BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT instead, we could’ve had a masterclass of claustrophobic framing. And helicopter chases.
Ask any worthwhile artist whether money or praise means the most to them, and they’ll tell you that longevity means the most. OUTBREAK has popped up in interesting places since 1995. For instance, the third episode of Clerks: The Animated Series in 2000 and the third part of The Simpsons’ 34th “Treehouse of Horror” in 2023. Plus, it became the poster child of COVID catharsis, along with CONTAGION, in 2020. Like Dom told Brian in THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, it doesn’t matter whether you win by an inch or a mile: winning’s winning. Thirty years later, that little monkey’s still toting a bucket of win.
