User Reviews

Possible spoilers contained within.

I just finished watching this movie with my wife. She is a health care professional - a nurse - and a former military medical professional. I'm also former military - an NBC specialist - so I know way too much about this stuff in real life.

After watching about half an hour of this movie on FX, the first comment we made to each other was that this is entirely too realistic. The second comment after about an hour was that this movie is scarier than any slasher flick that we've seen.

The premise behind the movie is simple - a terrorist infects a small population in New York City with smallpox, which, with modern travel, is able to go around the world during the incubation period and eventually kill millions around the world.

We did not particularly care for the ending - it is possible that a terrorist might have not had his identity discovered. It is highly unlikely that the nationality of the terrorist would not have been found, though. One thing that we both found to be incorrect was in the burying of the bodies. That may have been the only thing to do in third world countries. However, the only real way to insure that the bodies do not continue to be breeding colonies would be cremation. So in this case the film makers missed the mark.

By not using well known actors, the film makers made this look just like real documentaries that play on the History Channel. The voice actor that impersonated President Bush was very good as well, and including Al Sharpton in a cameo made for a nice touch as well.

I did find it interesting that there were no comments in the film about infections in the middle east. Perhaps this was a deliberate attempt not to mention Iran, Libya, North Korea or any other country where such biological weapons have been known to be made. Another note is that such an event was covered quite nicely by Tom Clancy years ago as a prelude to a military action.

One comment by the Russian scientist - these are not weapons of mass destruction, just mass casualties - is true to a certain extent. The film makers did not cover - perhaps wisely - that if this had been found to be the result of action by a nation state, that the response of the U.S. is to respond in kind. And the U.S. considers gas to be a bug to be a nuke - so while we don't have massive stocks of nerve gas or bio-weapons, we do have plenty of nukes available.

The last few minutes of the movie seemed quite rushed. I think this one could have lasted about another hour, and been fleshed out MUCH more - instead of going from day 31 to day 91 so quickly.

All in all, a 10 for realism, a 5 for being rushed, and an 8 overall. Very scary stuff, when you really think about it. It would have only taken a bit more for the pandemic to have killed many, many more people around the world - and that should have been covered.

I thought that this was a pretty good movie. I do have a problem with the origin of the outbreak apparently being a lone-nut, presumably some Christian fanatic who is carrying out some fantasy of bringing the grim story of the Revelations into reality.

I have no doubt that there are lunatics out there who would do just that if they had a chance. I just don't see how such an individual would procur any quantity of smallpox from a corrupt Russian scientist from the Soviet BW program.

What I think would be a much more plausible scenario would have been a group like al-Qaeda procuring stocks of a BW weapon with the help of some elements of Russian organized crime. Yet I can't help but think that the agent of choice would be something like Marburg, Tularemia, or weaponized anthrax. Those BW agents kill extremely fast and very dramatically but they aren't as unpredictably and explosively contagious.

The bottom line is that despite the anthrax letters, I am much more scared of an organized group like al-Qaeda sprinkling a couple of kilograms of weaponized, inhalational anthraw over New York City than the scenario described in this movie.

That being said, I do hope that the civil defense planners here and around the world, watch it and take note.

I think that it would have been much more likely ending to find a Koran with a verse from it underlined given the manifest terrorist threat that we face than a Bible. But something tells me that in this politically correct era in which we live, that would have been unthinkable --even though al-Qaeda would cheerfully wipe us off the map with any weapon they could field.

It is impressing. One man is shown to use the smallpox virus for a killing work that makes Hitler look like hardly more than a bad kid. Hitler needed a whole state to carry out his deeds. The terrorist in the movie did it alone. Well, probably not quite alone - it does not become clear where he has the Russian smallpox strain from. It can only be first-hand if he used to work in a lab - either in official Russian facilities or, more likely, somewhere in the Middle East where some Russian smallpox has been sold to (I'm sure it has, it's easy to steal a drop of the stuff from a whole tank). I don't see why people say the terrorist has created the smallpox himself (it is provably possible to do so, but I didn't hear it in the movie and it would not have been exactly the India-1). And I think the "his skin was blackened and he was covered in bleeding sores" about the first black pox case is some factual goof. Blisters filling with blood are possible, of course, they can leak through the central "navel" or just burst, too. But if a person is totally hemorrhagic, blackened and plainly dying after only three days of disease, it's early hemorrhagic smallpox. In such cases there are no "pox" as such. They have no time to develop. But I am willing to forgive it because it is a kind of illustration for the common audience - I know that blackened skin is subcutaneous hemorrhage, but not everybody does. Otherwise, I think, it is really well made and I feel safe to give the movie an 8.

Oh, and one thing I initially forgot: In reality, there could be even more dead... The movie takes the former natural lethality of smallpox (abut 30%) as a premise. But with a strain which has been through labs and probably modified, a higher lethality rate can hardly be ruled out (obviously).

The FX network broadcast this film on January 2 with little fanfare, and that's too bad; it deserves a wider audience. The movie is very realistic and, with few exceptions, the actors don't come across as actors. They look as "real" as any of the other experts that pop up on innumerable documentaries that pop up on U.S. cable channels today.

The plot revolves around a strain of smallpox that appears in April 2002 in New York and, by the fall, is the cause of death for 60 million people on Earth. (That's summarized in the first 100 words of narration, so it's not a spoiler.) It's produced in the basic docudrama style of what happened, the cause, personal anecdotes and the summary. Stock footage of civil disruption and disasters are woven into the new footage that gives the movie a realistic look. Reports are also interjected from the BBC, SkyTV and New York's WNBC with familiar news readers.

The ending is a bit rushed, with the last 20 minutes going by in a "boy we have to wrap this up" flurry of connecting loose ends. The terrorist's identity is also left vague, which is one of the movie's few letdowns. (Others may see this as a realistic plus.) One small correction on an earlier review -- the person doesn't travel around the world spreading the disease (that's the plot line of "12 Monkeys"). The infected person only appears for one morning in downtown and midtown Manhattan, which may be scarier than someone criss-crossing the planet with a biological weapon.