Seal the Town, Spare the Monkey

The most dangerous room in Outbreak is a cinema.

It's a small-town picture house in Cedar Creek, California, and it is where the film's virus stops being a problem for people who touch blood and becomes a problem for people who sit near each other. A film that wants us frightened of the air chooses a place people go for fun. In March 2020, when real cinemas started to close, Outbreak climbed the Netflix chart in the United States. People stayed in and watched a film in which the way to catch the virus was to go out.

That's an unusual double life for a studio thriller. Wolfgang Petersen's film came out on 10 March 1995, cost a little over $50 million, opened at number one in America and took about $190 million worldwide. It was written by Laurence Dworet and Robert Roy Pool, and it has a cast with no weak links: Dustin Hoffman as Colonel Sam Daniels, a virologist at the army's USAMRIID; Rene Russo as his ex-wife Robby, who works at the CDC; Morgan Freeman and Donald Sutherland as the two generals who know more than they say; Cuba Gooding Jr. as Major Salt, an army doctor; and Kevin Spacey as Daniels's colleague Casey Schuler. Harrison Ford was offered Daniels and passed. Hoffman plays it at a rumpled sprint.

The art: a very good plane ticket

Start with what works. Petersen, who knew how to keep a closed space tense from Das Boot, keeps the pace brisk and the stakes legible. The first half is a proper procedural: a village in Zaire emptied by a virus called Motaba, a capuchin monkey smuggled into California, an animal-lab worker who steals it, and a chain of infections that you can trace like a fuse. The suit-up scenes are tactile. Hoffman and Spacey fastening each other into blue protective suits is a better image than anything in the poster, and the production design of the military labs gives the film a bruised, institutional look. James Newton Howard's score swells at the right moments and Michael Ballhaus, a great cinematographer, makes Cedar Creek's quarantine look like an American town on the worst day of its life.

Then the film does what thrillers do. It needs a human to hate, and the virus won't do. So the script invents a conspiracy: in 1967 the generals ordered an infected camp bombed to bury the first strain of Motaba, and in 1995 one of them, McClintock, wants the new airborne mutation kept as a weapon. By the second half, the film is no longer about a disease. It's about a man chasing a monkey in a helicopter while a bomber crew counts down to Cedar Creek. The plot dissolves into a succession of obstacles that one man can overcome by ignoring orders, and the virus, once the most interesting thing in the film, turns into a clock.

That is the gap between a 7 and an 8. The first hour treats an epidemic as a problem of logistics, tracing and authority. The last hour treats it as a problem of nerve. Critics said as much at the time, and Janet Maslin's line that no problem is too thorny to be solved by movie heroics is still the fairest summary of the second half.

The prophecy: four bets

Outbreak makes four bets about how an epidemic would arrive. Two are looking good, one is half right and the last is where the film stops being a forecast.

The animal trade. A sick monkey crosses the border and a virus finds the American public. In 1995 that was a thriller premise. In 2003 it was a CDC report. A Texas distributor imported about 800 small African mammals from Ghana, including Gambian giant rats and dormice. Some of them carried monkeypox, and it spread to prairie dogs at an Illinois dealer and from there to people who kept them as pets. By early July the CDC had counted 71 cases in six states. Two children were seriously ill, and both recovered. It was far milder than the film's Motaba, and the route was almost exactly the same: wildlife, a dealer, a pet, a person.

The airborne leap. In the film the virus mutates into an airborne strain and, after a cinema outbreak, spreads through the town. This is the part most likely to stay fiction. The WHO says Ebola spreads by direct contact with the blood and body fluids of a sick person, not through the air. But the underlying worry is real: in 2012 a team at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam reported that as few as five amino acid changes might let H5N1 bird flu pass between ferrets through the air, which set off a long argument about whether such work should be published. The mutant virus spread less well than the 2009 pandemic flu. So the mechanism is plausible, the speed is pure cinema, and the film's Motaba behaves like an Ebola-type virus that has learned to act like influenza.

The cordon. After the mutation the army closes Cedar Creek and puts it under martial law. Nothing like that happened in the United States in 2020. What happened in the United States was a civilian, one-mile "containment area" around New Rochelle, New York, announced on 10 March 2020, with schools and large gathering places shut for two weeks and the National Guard sent in to deliver food and clean public spaces. Governor Cuomo said people could still move freely. The film's idea, that a town can be sealed on a scale of days, was right. The film's soldiers with guns at the gate were not.

The cure. Salt and Daniels capture the monkey, Betsy, whose antibodies are combined with a donor's serum to make an antiserum. On screen this takes about the length of a scene. The film's virus multiplies in about an hour and its cure works at once. Real antibody treatments do exist now. In October 2020 the FDA approved Inmazeb, a three-antibody mixture, for Zaire ebolavirus, and WHO recommends it and another antibody. In the PALM trial, 33.8 per cent of patients given Inmazeb died within 28 days, against 51 per cent of the control group. That's a real, lifesaving result, and it arrived 25 years after the film, and the trial ran during an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The distance between "years" and "a montage" is the film's biggest flight of fancy, and the target that G7 and G20 leaders have embraced, a vaccine within 100 days of a new threat, shows how far off the film's pace still is.

The reading

Outbreak is a good Friday-night film with an excellent first hour. It's better as prophecy than as drama, because it was right about where a virus comes from and wrong about who stops it. Petersen's villain is a general who wants a weapon. The real antagonist in 2020 was a lot duller: a slow test, a late decision, an official who said the risk was low. You can't put those in a helicopter chase.

What lasts is the cinema. People remember that a film about a plague put it where we all gather, and then remember that, when the plague came, the rooms emptied and the film kept running. The film gave us a sealed town and a saved monkey. The decade that followed gave us the town without the monkey.