Outbreak movie review & film summary (1995)

"Outbreak" opens 30 years ago, in Africa, as American doctors descend on a small village that has been wiped out by a deadly new plague. They promise relief but send instead a single airplane that incinerates the village with a firebomb. The implication is that the microbe is too deadly to deal with any other way; there is no information about where the bug came from, or why it surfaced in this remote area, although the village witch doctor is quoted ominously: "It is not good to kill the trees." Flash forward to the present. Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo are a newly divorced couple, both experts in disease-causing microorganisms. He works for the Army, and she has just taken a new job at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. As we follow the disintegration of their relationship, Petersen intercuts scenes showing an African monkey being illegally imported into the United States. This monkey, of course, carries the deadly bug, and the smuggler, unable to sell it, releases it in a California woodland, although not before being infected.

Petersen now shows the disease being spread from one carrier to another, in a montage that would be funny if it were not so chilling: When the first carrier gets off a flight to Boston, he is flushed, sweating, trembling and almost too weak to stand, but his girlfriend, of course, doesn't let his illness stand in the way of a long, deep kiss. Back in a small California town, an infected carrier sneezes in a movie theater, and the camera stalks the germs as they wend their way through the crowd. In a laboratory, a test tube breaks in a centrifuge, and a scientist is infected. And so on. I especially liked the moment when the smuggler takes one bite out of a cookie on an airplane, and a little kid asks him if he's planning to eat the rest of it.

Soon reports of a plague outbreak filter in from Boston and California. Hoffman is assigned to the case by his superior officer (Morgan Freeman). But as he and a colleague (Kevin Spacey) follow the trail of infection and spread, we get glimpses of a deep conspiracy involving Freeman's own commanding officer, a sinister general played by Donald Sutherland. For some reason, the Army has secrets involving this bug. It also possesses an antidote, although after the microbe mutates into a different form, only the original carrier - the monkey - can serve as the source of an antibody.