It's the end of the world, but just as we know it.
Modern day America. A deadly, indefinite virus has plunged society into a dystopian chaos, leaving four young friends to traverse the desolate landscape in frenzied but futile search of a cure. If this premise is starting to sound a bit familiar, that’s because Carriers is nothing new. It is, in fact, the most generic of genre films, formulaically stuttering along and ticking boxes en route, before retiring as tamely as it arrived.
Originally billed for a 2007 release, Àlex and David Pastor's directorial debut may not have seen the light of day were it not for the presence of Chris Pine who, feet firmly back on Earth after this Summer's intergalactic voyage, takes charge of proceedings as the film's bullish, shoot-first-ask-questions-later antihero.
While his brutish bravado paints Pine as the films primary aggressor, he is ultimately little more than a condemned casualty of a global pandemic, appointing himself as protector for his girlfriend Bobby (Perabo), brother Danny (Taylor Pucci) and school friend Kate (Van Camp).
Although it is a charmless turn from Pine, his abrasiveness at least stimulates some conflict, while the rest of the groups endless bitching and head scratching is entirely unconstructive if not insufferable.
Budgetary constraints consign the film to the shallower depths of the end-of-the-world gene pool, but the Pastor brothers do manage to utilise the vast expanses of the Great American West to some effect, juxtaposing the steely optimism of our hapless protagonists with the wasteland that will inevitably consume them.
Ambling through empty backroads in search of fuel and shelter salvation becomes a fast fading likelihood, however, and subsequently the deflating moods of our would-be survivors takes its toll on the films pace, which becomes increasingly protracted.
Here is a prime example of studio bosses missing the mark in trying to squeeze financial success out of a screenplay that would have benefited from a defter touch. In a post-apocalpytic wake the central characters increasingly strained relationships underscore the film with psychological tension and trauma, marking this as more of a character piece than a high-octane horror show.
In lacking both subtley and specatcle, however, Carriers timidly takes its place in the realms of forgettable science-fiction fodder.
After two years on studio lockdown enthusiasm is always going to be hard to ignite.
Naïvely banks on a leading man who found his feet in space but fails to hit to the ground running here.
Not a disastrous debut, but forgettable nonetheless.
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Anton Bitel
• 3 years agoIt is not true that the four young friends "traverse the desolate landscape in frenzied but futile search of a cure" - although they are in one episode of their picaresque travels joined by a man who is looking for a cure (for his daughter). On the contrary, the four principals more or less hold to the rule that it is always better to abandon the infected than to hope for a cure - and it is this rule (far more than the illness itself) which gradually strips them of every value that makes them human.
What in fact the four are pursuing is not a cure, but rather a nostalgic memory - but when they (or at least some of them) finally make it back to the locus of their childhood, they realise that any vestigial innocence to which they may have been clinging has in fact already long been buried in the sands of time, and they are faced only with the desolate ruins of themselves. Pine's noted 'charmless...abrasiveness' is absolutely essential to his character (not that he is really the main character) - and indeed this is hardly a film to which one would ascribe charm of any kind - but if you want to be confronted with the precarious fragility of our society in extremis, the Pastor brothers' film (about brotherly bonds broken) gets you down that bleak road fast.
Michelle
• 3 years agoMichelle
• 3 years agoAnd then, Chris Pine's character Brian showed himself to be selfish and heartless as well. While it is understandable that he was angry at his girlfriend's lack of judgment and honesty with regards to her own infection, why did he NOT volunteer to be left on the side of the road as he forced his girlfriend to do a few scenes earlier? That shows an inconsistency in his own character, and an inconsistency in the moral message the film is so eagerly trying to convey. The script and film could definitely have used more pruning and forethought before this movie went to packaging.
Michelle
• 3 years agoMichelle
• 3 years agoAnton Bitel
• 3 years agorbk
• 3 years agoArchiS
• 3 years agoArchiS
• 3 years agoAnton Bitel
• 3 years agoI don't disagree - I think all willed actions are moral in one way or another, pretty much by definition - but what I was trying to suggest was that their newly adopted (and, in context, horribly understandable) rule that all infected must be abandoned serves gradually to override and undermine every other principle that they hold/held dear, including their moral ties in turn to strangers, children, partners, and finally blood kin. Their older morality, by which their very humanity was defined, rapidly gives way to a newer, simpler morality predicated on pure survival - and the film shows with unflinching bleakness just what (and who) they lose to that end.
One thing, though: when you say 'Danny', I think you mean Brian (played by Chris Pine), partner of Bobby and brother to the nice-seeming, weak-willed protagonist Danny (Lou Taylor Pucci)?