Outbreak (Film Review)

1995 Warner Bros.
Directed by: Wolfgang Petersen; Written by: Laurence Dworet and Robert Roy Pool (Based Upon The Hot Zone, by: Richard Preston)
Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman, Donald Sutherland, Cuba Gooding Jr., Patrick Dempsey, and Kevin Spacey
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 128 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 6/10

Military doctor and infectious disease expert, Sam Daniels, is absolutely sure there's going to be a worldwide outbreak of a highly infectious, deadly virus one day. He has apparently cried wolf a bit, but this time, the threat appears real. The citizens in Cedar Creek, California are coming down with something that causes them to bleed from the eyes and die, just a couple days after they're infected. The town is quarantined, and Daniels and his team, including his separated wife, want to try to help, and possibly find a cure. However, the dastardly General McClintock is mysteriously dead-set on forgoing a cure, and fire-bombing the city. Just what is McClintock hiding? Can Daniels and his team find the disease's original host and a cure not only before everyone in Cedar Creek bleeds to death out of their eyeballs, but before McClintock nukes them into oblivion?
Thanks to Richard Preston's best-selling, horrific non-fiction book, The Hot Zone, along with some real-life outbreaks, few things were freakier to think about in the 90's than an all-out Ebola epidemic. Preston described how the incurable, 90% fatal Ebola basically transforms your body into one giant goopy Ebola trash bag, forcing you to projectile vomit and diarrhea out blood that's nothing more than highly concentrated Ebola juice so that you will infect everyone around you before you completely liquify into a soggy pool where nothing is still living but Ebola. It's truly terrifying. Apparently, too terrifying for director, Wolfgang Petersen, his screenwriters, or Warner Brothers, as the Ebola ripoff virus in 1995's Outbreak is renamed Motaba, and only makes the infected bleed just a little from the eyes before death. It's also entirely curable.
Outbreak tries to make up for the lack of extremeness in its central disease by making everything else it can extreme, as every car tire hitting a mud puddle feels like it is setting off an explosion, and a man sneezing in a movie theater's spittle goes airborne, gets zoomed in upon, and is shown flying down everyone around the man's eyes, nose, and throats. Things getting a little too slow? How about some helicopter chases and explosions. As Daniels, Dustin Hoffman does all the yelling and weird line readings you could want. Since the actual disease is tamed, and the plot is as straightforward as possible, these random wacky moments and extreme touches at least add to the film's entertainment value, making this otherwise underwhelming blockbuster worth watching.