The world of cinema seems to steadfastly believe that Earth is but one bug or germ away from end of civilisation, with multiple films each year delighting in illustrating how polite society will fracture and crumble as we drop like flies.
In Carriers we open well after this has taken place. The United States and perhaps everywhere else (the film alludes to Asia at least) having been decimated by an unnamed pandemic. The infected ‘carriers’ walk among us, already essentially dead and just waiting – or fighting futilely against – the inevitability of symptoms that will slowly and painfully choke the life from them within days.
The precious few survivors move about trying to find a safe haven or a place free of the infected. The film follows one such quartet as they try to travel towards the coast, where two brothers Brian (Chris Pine) and Danny once shared pleasant childhood holidays with their family. That was a long time ago.
Now Brian is an intense, perpetually angry and hot tempered dick, while Danny is a meek and seemingly in awe of his big brother’s forceful personality. Along with the brothers are Brian’s girlfriend Bobby (Piper Perabo) and pretty young Kate, who is not Danny’s girlfriend even if he clearly thinks she should be.
Bobby is a nice and well balanced young woman who for some reason forgives Brian’s ramblings and rashness as ‘Brian being Brian’, which is akin to saying that’s just a ‘prick being a prick’ and not judging them. Kate is wide eyed, reserved and often silent, and is perhaps the most sensible and realistic of the bunch.
The four travel about (initially) in a large and fast Mercedes and later in whatever they can find. With the normal rules and regulations of polite society long since abandoned they all – especially Brian – delight in breaking the taboos of polite society, usually in small ways but eventually things far more serious. Instead of these guidelines they implement just a couple of hard and fast parameters that cannot be ignored: don’t allow yourself to be breathed or otherwise touched by an infected, and take great pains not to touch anything that the infected recently touched or wore.
Both of these rules sound perfectly logical in theory, however the fact that the infected aren’t zombies or rage fuelled, instead often being otherwise normal little kids or decent adults, makes a deliberate lack of contact or decency difficult to adhere to, often to the detriment of all parties.
Along the long road the foursome encounter many people of both the infected and non-infected varieties, among them a father and his young infected daughter, some men who have painstakingly carved a germ free niche in an empty hotel complex, and a pair of elderly women making their own journey.
The performances in this film are actually pretty good, better than is often the case anyway. You probably won’t end up liking any of the characters, but somehow I think that is almost the point, pressure and an absence of guidance brings chaos and strips us of any semblance of decency.
Carriers has aspirations to be The Road, a depressing and horrifying film following the tortuous route taken by a man and his young son through a similarly harsh post-apocalyptic environment that was nonetheless an excellent and compelling film. (There are also touches of Stake Land and The Walking Dead).
But Carriers is not The Road nor does it manage to remind us of any of the best elements from the others mentioned. It is OK though.
Unlike other films that might show the horror of being attacked or stalked by the infected, or have the roles reversed and have Brian and Danny turned into fearless hunters of the infected, Carriers chooses to take the road most recently examined by The Divide (far inferior to even this), that showed how people react under intense pressure, stress and having life or death decisions forced upon them frequently.
Carriers is a film that is deliberately not ‘boo’ scary and far less violent and gory than most of its similarly themed predecessors, this is both a limited strength and a weakness, as while the concept is of course terrifying it actually does help to include a few moments to entertain or thrill the audience. (Which the afore-mentioned The Divide tried to its detriment, so I guess it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t.)
I can appreciate that this film chose to take an alternate route when handling a now familiar topic, it’s just that the resultant film doesn’t do enough for me to recommend that anyone else watch it.
Carriers isn’t that bad, there just isn’t much to it. And why is fuel so very hard to come by in a country with more vehicles than any other on the globe and apparently 95% of vehicle users no longer able to drive?
Final Rating – 6.5 / 10. Carriers tries to revive a tiring genre by reversing the roles, in this film the living do far more damage and cause more untimely death than the disease. It’s just that I wasn’t yet tired of watching zombies and infected assailants being the aggressors.
Decent film. With the one and only rule = survival at all costs. Outcome: No humanity left, there’s just a place. So much so that not even the new Eve is consolation, as she’s simply a stranger with whom there are no words to say. Or you might say, as the one other soul said, this is a story of moral apocalypse. In other words, if you’re looking for the complete stripping away of one’s humanity, try a situational ethics as on display here. Lastly, and by the way, the film is also good for another purpose, to wit, shows us who are the (1) the non-moralists are (there wasn’t enough zombie apocalypse) and (2) the sociopaths among us (what was wrong with the prime directive of survival at any and all costs).
Good points all. Thanks for commenting.
I think the thing I agreed with most was the word “decent”.