From Kramer vs. Kramer conquering the Oscars at the peak of second-wave feminism to Wag the Dog hitting theaters at around the time then-President Clinton ordered a military strike on suspected terrorist sites in the midst of his own notorious sex scandal, many Dustin Hoffman-headlined films take on a strange cultural topicality.  In 1995, Wolfgang Petersen’s bio-thriller Outbreak happened to hit theaters at a time when Ebola was killing hundreds of people in Central Africa, kicking off a number of debates in America over what the CDC really would do if a disease like that hit the homeland.

It had quite the impact back then, and even today the film is referenced when discussing the latest scare disease or epidemic feared to be the next Black Death.  Such a standard-setter for the subject of epidemiological paranoia…and I don’t particularly care for it.

The main problem with Outbreak stems from a type of mindset that plagued (no pun intended) 90’s Hollywood studios.  For some reason, there was distrust in seemingly every serious-minded American movie with a budget of over $50 million dollars to allow their own conceits to sell themselves.  Especially obvious in the glut of John Grisham adaptations that flooded that decade, several star-studded, contemporary, ostensibly cerebral thrillers were often turgid affairs that kept eschewing a juicy premise for the sake of cheap sentiment.The film’s most compelling asset is without a doubt the Motaba virus itself; a contagion so destructive that a military commander who is very obviously Donald Sutherland orders to bomb an entire village to eliminate the risk of it getting out before the opening credits.  It works fast; taking hold in only a few hours and from there ravages the body with pustules, lesions and internal hemorrhages.  It eventually kills the infected by liquefying the internal organs.  To his credit, Petersen mostly does not shy away from showing the effects of this thankfully fictional disease, cutting away only to avoid the most gruesome details in what I suspect was an attempt to avoid an R rating (not that it mattered; the MPAA slapped that rating on anyway, with its sole citation being – get this – “language.”  Pretty sure a kid would be more emotionally scarred by seeing someone bleeding out of their eyes than someone saying “fuck.”).  Any time the film focuses on the ravages of the disease, or how it mutates, or the desperate and seemingly futile attempts at containing it, Outbreak is fairly effective at exploiting a very specific kind of fear.

"You're right, Sam. I'd rather listen to your marriage hang-ups than focus on a deadly disease!"

But then the Hollywood bullshit steps in.  On top of having to deal with the deadliest disease known to man, Dustin Hoffman-as-Dustin-Hoffman-as-Colonel Sam Daniels also has to deal with recently divorcing fellow virologist Robby Keough, played by Rene Russo.  In one cringetastic scene, they spend several minutes as she’s about to leave for Atlanta, having a loaded argument about who keeps the dogs.  Of course, it’s “really” an argument about their relationship, as he Can’t Let Go and she’s Ready To Move On, and the audience taps their feet impatiently.  Even when Motaba improbably makes it to a small town in the United States, the movie screeches to a halt every now and then to update us on their marital status.  “Sam, we’re about to look at the most deadly virus you and I have ever seen.  I think your mind should be somewhere in that neighborhood!”  That’s wise advice from Kevin Spacey’s Major Casey Schuler; I wonder why the film didn’t take it?

Oh, but there’s more.  Daniels finds out that Sutherland’s Major General Donald McClintock has a Sinister Agenda to – surprise, surprise – weaponize the virus.  He then impedes on Sam’s work, ordering his friend and superior Brigadier General Billy Ford (in yet another phoned-in performance; this time from Morgan Freeman) to Take Him Off The Case, prompting Sam to investigate What’s Really Going On.  McClintock, dead-set on protecting what he hopes will become a secret biological weapon, decides to incinerate the entire town of Cedar Creek as he did the Motaba outpost in ’67.  It’s a subplot that we’ve seen (in varying degrees) a million times, complete with a totally out-of-place helicopter chase sequence and a speech from Dustin Hoffman that is so corny you’d think you were infected with Hypoglycemia by its goopy conclusion.

Wasn’t Motaba enough of an antagonist?  Did we really need to have our tremor-voiced hero stare down yet another cliché Rogue General along with trying to cure such a ravenous syndrome?  Furthermore, did we really need to have Sam and Robby use this possible pandemic as a means to rekindle their relationship?  Did the people behind this film really think we would care about that?  Hell, even the actual investigation of the Motaba virus is botched, as their tracking of how it’s transmitted is implausibly linear and easy.  If curing such a devastating disease simply requires finding the host and manufacturing enough serum from it to cure thousands of people in seemingly only a few minutes, you have to wonder why those idiots at the CDC haven’t conquered HIV already.

If they were trying to insert sentiment in order to avoid having Outbreak feel too “clinical,” they were looking for it in the wrong place.  Arguably the most affecting scene in the entire film is when we see a mother of two sent off to be tested for the virus.  Choking back tears, she reassures them that she’ll only be gone “for a few hours” when she and her husband know that she’s marching to her possible death, not even able to hug her daughters goodbye for fear of infecting them.  In only a few minutes, we care more about this poor woman than we ever did for our two bickering, divorced heroes.  Again, when the film deals with the direct effects of Motaba itself, it can be very good (if never truly great).

As a result of the constant nonsense clogging up the main plot, Outbreak isn’t necessarily a bad movie, just a tediously pedestrian one.  So what plunged it into the depths of mediocrity?

There's your culprit!

Well, in 1994 a book called The Hot Zone, expanded from a New Yorker article called “Crisis in the Hot Zone,” was published and quickly became a hit.  Authored by Richard Preston, the book is a sensational account of the origins of the Ebola and Marburg viruses, and their effects on the human body.  It was only a matter of time before Hollywood came knocking.  More accurately, they were engaged in a vicious bidding war for the rights to adapt it.  20^th Century Fox won the bid on the condition that the book’s female lead character not be marginalized in the film.  Producer Lynda Obst headed the project and hired James V. Hart to write, Ridley Scott to direct and Jodie Foster to star.  Meanwhile, Oscar-winning Platoon producer and auction loser Arnold Kopelson decided he would make his own deadly virus movie, thank you very much, and bought a spec script by a former emergency room doctor named Laurence Dworet and a writer named Robert Roy Pool to do just that.  But, thinking that the movie needed more of an “edge,” he brought Ted Tally in to rewrite huge portions of the screenplay for what would eventually be called Outbreak.  Meanwhile, The Hot Zone was falling apart; apparently Fox was afraid that a woman couldn’t headline a movie on her own, so they crammed in an unnecessary manly environmentalist and paid Robert Redford an exorbitant amount of money to co-headline the cast.  Foster complained that the studio had done exactly what they promised they wouldn’t do, and the resulting tug-of-war between the two stars over screen time eventually scrapped the project.

It’s a heartbreaking story, but not an uncommon one: potentially great film ruined by studio greed and cowardice.  Sadly, it wasn’t the first time writers Dworet and Pool experienced this.  Their screenplay for a terrorist thriller called The Ultimatum was hailed by Steven Spielberg as “one of the most exciting screenplays I’ve ever read,” but the same nonsense that plagued The Hot Zone also put The Ultimatum in perpetual development hell.

This weekend sees the release of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, about a lethal airborne virus that throws the world into panic.  Many people have recently been making comparisons to Petersen’s film and wondering why Soderbergh would even bother “remaking” it, apparently forgetting that Outbreak wasn’t that good in the first place.  That doesn’t guarantee Contagion will be a better film, but it does have the enormous advantage of being produced in today’s movie environment; one where trite Hollywood subplots (mostly) wouldn’t be tolerated by mainstream audiences anymore…well, audiences looking for an adult thriller at least.  In this era, films like Contagion are expected to have a little more integrity.

And we can all be grateful for that.

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