Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.
Plagues are inherently scary, I think. When it comes to movie monsters, in most cases, or at least some of them, it feels like you can fight back against them. Sure, most of us are going to be dropped pretty quickly by a vampire, but with a sharpened stake, at least you’ve got a chance. Someone’s gonna end up being the final girl, after all. But with plagues, it feels like there’s not much that can be done. With the coronavirus now moving through the world, the idea of a killing pandemic is especially terrifying. So, naturally, I watched Carriers, a film about a virulent plague that more or less wipes out the entire planet.
We’re not going to see a lot of the plague here in terms of masses of people dying. Carriers starts with the unnamed plague having more or less wiped out most of the human population. We have four people driving in a car to start with. These are Brian (Chris Pine), his girlfriend Bobby (Piper Perabo), his brother Danny (Lou Taylor Pucci), and Danny’s putative girlfriend Kate (Emily VanCamp). We learn about the plague more or less from a bit of exposition right before the title card drops. The plague is highly contagious and anyone coming into contact with a plague carrier needs to disinfect anything that that person has touched in the last 24 hours. Plague carriers are also highly contagious themselves, as the contagion is airborne.
