Carriers (2009)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

A highly contagious virus has wiped out the majority of the human race. Four survivors—Brian (Chris Pine), his girlfriend Bobby (Piper Perabo), his younger brother Danny (Lou Pucci), and Kate (Emily VanCamp)—attempt to get to the coast where they hope to ride out the pandemic at the deserted beach-side hotel where the brothers spent their holidays as kids.I love apocalyptic horror films that deal with virulent diseases wiping out humanity, the fear factor heightened by the very real possibility of such an occurrence. Carriers uses such a scary set-up, but fails to capitalise on its potential with a weak script that goes nowhere over the course of its 84 minutes. The photogenic-but-bland characters travel to their destination, encountering a few predictable obstacles on the way, but there is nothing substantial to grip the viewer.

I enjoyed the movie which has a very simple underlying plot, was probably made on a fairly low budget but didn't suffer from that, and although some of the acting was merely average the story was carried along well. The story had the characters fulfil their roles well, without being particularly predictable or boring, and a fair number of times I would wonder whether they would act purely logically to reduce risks or give in to their emotions and take a risk.I found myself being very sympathetic with the characters, and wondered what I would do in such circumstances. Would I be strong and ruthless, a leader? Could I protect myself and my family/friends by watching out for us all, if we lived through such a disaster?So I scored it 7 because it was an enjoyable movie which made me think "what if" a fair number of times.

This is a gem in Germany, they even offer extreme limited editions over there. For other countries it's an almost overlooked flick. That's sad because it do offer a few things.I can't really say that this is a horror flick, this is more a thriller because it's about 4 friends having to survive the virus attack that turns you into a zombie in stead of being attacked by zombies. Slowly the friends run into trouble and when one of them is being infected the characters become the most important thing here. It's not bad at all but being a horror geek I thought that it would offer more towards the infected but it doesn't. No problem, you can see the trouble coming once they pull over for a car in need.It never becomes rather gory or bloody. The only thing that is rather messy and even that's a bit low is when they ran again against a car with two elderly women in it. It's a nice entry in the post apocalyptic genre with believable acting. It never bored me because the ran into different situations every time. Gore 0/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 3/5 Story 3/5 Comedy 0/5

Most films, especially genre pictures like horror or suspense, are initially strong and then fade a bit as they go along. Pretty much every aspiring screenwriter and director gets hammered into them the importance of grabbing the audience right away, though few are capable of sustaining that attraction through an entire story. Carriers is the exact opposite. This thing actually gets a bit better as it goes along. Unfortunately, it has one of the weakest and most dramatically ill-conceived beginnings I've ever seen. This movie opens up by completely emasculating its own premise and spends the rest of its time on screen struggling to overcome that crippling mistake. And since this is a PG-13 horror/suspense flick, it doesn't have nearly the amount of violence, nudity and other provocative material to get the job done.The plot concerns a quartet of young people driving through the country in the wake of a disease outbreak that has all but destroyed civilization. Brian and Danny (Chris Pike and Lou Taylor Pucci) are brothers. Brian is the older bro and is sort of the high school jock a few years after graduation who hasn't quite realized his best days are behind him. Danny is the younger, smarter brother who's always played second fiddle to his more assertive sibling. They're joined by Brian's girlfriend Bobbi (Piper Perabo) and Kate (Emily VanCamp), a girl who knows Danny but the two of them are not together. They're traveling to a beachside hotel Brian and Danny's family visited in the past, now long abandoned, and hope to set up camp there and stay alive until the outbreak ends. As you might expect, they run into other folks along the way that complicate those plans and find that avoiding infection is harder than they thought.Now, I want to emphasize that Carriers is not a bad little film when taken as a whole. It's fairly clichéd but those clichés are well utilized and it throws a few new wrinkles into the mix. For example, Brian and company live by a set of rules. Avoid the infected, disinfect anything they've touched and you can't save the sick because they're already dead. They wear surgical masks and rubber gloves and always have bleach at the ready. Then they encounter another band of survivors who've taken it to the extreme of always wearing full-on gas masks and home made haz-mat suit and it's interesting to compare and contrast the level of fear and social disintegration between the two groups. Chris Pine and Christopher Meloni, as the father of an infected girl, also do very good work conveying the inner struggle of what it's like to be the guy who has to try and keep it all together when the world is falling apart.I'm not sure any of that ultimately matters because Carriers comes damn close to ruining itself within the first 15 minutes. Brian and company encounter the aforementioned father and infected girl on the road. To that point, the audience hasn't seen any bodies or heard any terrible stories of the outbreak. This is the moment in the story where the amount of physical danger is supposed to be established and, by extension, the level or moral and ethical pressure facing all these characters. This is the scene that sets the stakes and asks the audience to consider what they would do in such dire circumstances. So, what do Brian and company do with the father and his infected daughter? They let them hitch a ride in the back of an SUV with only a thin layer of plastic and duct tape separating Brian, Danny, Bobbi and Kate from certain death.Really? Millions, possibly billions of people are dead from disease that's very easy to catch and is 100% lethal. The crisis is so severe that basic government functions have ceased and the world has become a jungle of all against all. And in that situation, rather than take more conclusive action to protect yourself, you rely on a plastic sheeting and duct tape, risking miserable death just to be kind to a couple of strangers. Really?I'm sure writer/directors Alex and David Pastor could provide a reason for why they started their movie like that and how it fits into the rest of the plot, but it doesn't matter what they intended. What they did, in fact, was to fatally undermine and defang the threat that is at the core of their story. Instead of the disease being a civilization-ending catastrophe, it's presented to the viewer as a bad case of measles or the mumps. It's something you don't want to get but nothing so virulent that it justifies extreme action to protect yourself. Even if you don't want to crank the Drama-o-meter up to 11 right away and leave yourself nowhere to go after that, you also can't turn it all the way down to zero and leave the audience wondering what the big deal is supposed to be. The rest of Carriers does an okay job of trying to crawl out from under such a glaring and massive error. I'm not sure anyone who watches is going to care.Without such disastrous storytelling at the opening, I would have said this film was worth watching. However, the rest of it isn't good enough that I can honestly recommend something with such a self-negating start.