Contagion

SPOILERS ABOUND!!

Breck Eisner's The Crazies was met with enough critical warmth that I started to think that it might actually be pretty good. Shows what a sucker I am, because the film is actually quite startlingly free of any kind of imagination, or even respect for its own scenario. Or, okay, not its own scenario, as it's a remake of George Romero's 1973 film of the same name, a film I'm also not overly keen on. However, there are moments in the Romero film I can at least look back on with admiration, while Eisner's take is like watching someone date-stamp a stack of incoming mail. You know precisely what they're doing, but have no idea why you would want to watch it.
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The Crazies, both versions, is a plague story -- more specifically, it's a quarantine story, and it is on this level that I want to focus. To dispense with the plot summary first: a bunch of people in a small rural town start to go unaccountably crazy, violently so, and the military swoops in to cordon off the joint, and to ruthlessly gun down anyone who tries to break their quarantine. Our heroes (Timothy Olyphant as the sheriff; Radha Mitchell as his wife; Danielle Panabaker as Mitchell's young friend and co-worker; Joe Anderson as Olyphant's deputy) are horrified by the brutality of this new prison-town that has sprung up around them, and seek to escape, both the military and the "crazies". So that's your story. There is much blood.
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My problem -- my main problem, because there are others -- is with the whole genre itself, or at least the way it's so often executed. Generally, and certainly in this film, filmmakers lazily settle on a black-and-white presentation for what should be a profoundly gray scenario. Just once I'd like to see a plague movie where one of the soldiers tasked with gunning down the civilians who seek to escape the quarantine take a break, rip off that goddamn gas mask, and break down sobbing. Instead, the portrayal of these characters is that of heartless automatons (often, a token "nice one" is thrown in, but in The Crazies remake, even that guy's niceness is burdened with some pretty big qualifiers) who at best thoughtlessly aim their weapon at a fleeing housewife and pull the trigger, and at worst find their inner bloodlust awakened by the job they've been handed.
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And why, might I ask, should it be assumed that our rooting interest always be with those who would break the quarantine? If they succeed, then they could very well be spreading these highly contagious and always deadly diseases to millions of other people. That's the entire reason the quarantines -- in film and in reality -- are in place. That's also the reason the fleeing housewives are being gunned down, but Eisner and his screenwriters have no interest in engaging with the logic of the story, or of their characters. The truth is that he heroes of these films, the Timothy Olyphants of the world, are usually mind-bogglingly selfish -- it is their safety that counts, and that of their loved ones. The rest of humanity can, quite honestly, fuck off. And it's not as though I don't understand the impulse to flee, but if these possibly disease-ridden people (and it's always the case that at least one of these heroes that have grouped themselves together actually does have the disease) gets shot in the head, am I supposed to think the solider holding the gun did something horribly wrong? Horrible, yes, but wrong? How many people did he just save with that bullet?
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As I say, it's a profoundly gray scenario, but almost nobody wants to engage with that side of it. Most often, they latch on to the "we are the real monsters!" idea (this is the idea on which Romero has built at least the second half of his career, and has also tried to retroactively apply to all the films he made before he thought it up), that not only means fuck-all in general, but usually means fuck-all within the very narrow confines of the individual movie. In The Crazies, as in many other similar films, the reasons for the quarantine, and the seemingly callous actions needed to keep it secure, are so plain that the filmmakers never even need to explain them (and they probably wouldn't if they thought they had to), but the story unspools as though it didn't matter. This person was shot, and that's bad. What's going through the mind of the man who pulled the trigger, or of those who gave the order for him to pull the trigger, are irrelevant.
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One recent film did actually address these issues, whether or not anyone wants to acknowledge it, and that film (today's Collection Project Film of the Day) is 28 Weeks Later (d. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo). In this sequel to Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, London is recovering from the "rage virus" that eviscerated the city in the earlier film. A quarantine has been set up, but one that, due to time and increasing resources, is able to be more gentle and communal. But strict rules apply: no one is allowed to travel into the parts of London that are outside the borders of the quarantine. When someone does, two children, early in the film, what happens? They bring the virus back inside. The military discovers this breach before the children make it back, but they are not heartlessly gunned down, as those trigger-happy madmen in The Crazies would no doubt have done. As a result, though, and as I say, the virus is back inside, and it spreads, and all hell breaks loose, to the point where the military has to open fire on a swarming pack of civilians, because if any of them gets out, and goes on the run, they will be spreading doom all across Europe.
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And guess what? That's exactly what happens. When both 28 Weeks Later and The Crazies were first released, I heard much talk about the political nature of both films, and the commentary on the way we live now, but I'm not sure anyone who made those nebulous points were considering the fact that, in 28 Weeks Later, the military is absolutely correct. It is because they are defeated that we see rage-infested people shrieking past the Eiffel Tower in the last shot. The people who escaped at the end of 28 Weeks Later were, ostensibly, the characters we were rooting for, and they succeeded. And look where it got us.
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PS - I freely adapted, to the point of quoting outright, this post from comments I left over at Arbogast on Film. If you read any of this over there, then I am profoundly sorry.

What the Hell Happened to THIS George Romero??

I just watched Martin for the first time in well over a decade, and I thought it was so strong, so original and insightful into its own story and characters, and so observant in its little details, that I'm left bewildered and saddened that this is the same guy who has more recently given us Diary of the Dead and Bruiser.

Many artists lose their grip on what used to make them great later in life -- and, after all, Martin was made in the same era during which Romero gave us his RenFaire biker epic Knightriders -- but I really feel like the problem in Romero's case is that he has completely bought into the line of bullshit about him being first and foremost a social satirist, and being a writer and director of horror films has become secondary to that. And before you say anything -- seriously, hold on for a second -- I'm not claiming social satire isn't part of what Romero does. I'm merely saying that he was never that first, and plus, probably more to the point, he's not really all that good at it. Zombies wondering around a mall works as a joke for about five seconds, before you (I) start to get wrapped up in the characters again.

You can say, rightly, that satire is not completely absent from Martin, because Romero's low view of religion does get full representation, but that's a shading to his story, not the story itself. A moment in the film that really struck me was when Martin gets dragged to church, and the service is being held in a shabby old attic, because, we learn, the actual church has burned down. If you want it, the way this scene plays out works well with Romero's theme of religion-as-superstition. But it also works beautifully as a throwaway bit of real-life detail, a moment that makes the film and characters and setting breathe. Had the scene not played that way, the thematic stuff would just sit there staring at you. In short, it's good storytelling. It doesn't hurt that Martin also has its share of easy and natural performances -- especially from John Amplas and Christine Forrest -- and set pieces like Martin's home invasion, that patiently and cruelly squeeze every drop of suspense and dread from the situation.

Romero used to have no money to make movies, and he doesn't have much more now, but he has some. That "some", and an unfortunate sense of importance, has killed his movies, in my view. He used to have to invent more, and he found that he was able to. Night of the Living Dead is one of those perfect ideas, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Frankenstein, that can be reworked, for good or ill, for decades, if not centuries, to come, because the basic story so directly taps into our fears and weaknesses. I can't fault the guy for only being able to do that once, but with Martin he showed that he could still create at a very high level. He coul still invent. But now he's just shrilly reworking the same ideas that less original filmmakers have already hammered all the life from. Not just the ideas of Night of the Living Dead or Martin, by the way, but also the limply "important" ones that came after.

I feel a little bad, already, for writing this. I didn't intend to be so negative. It's just that Martin is so damn good! I just want Romero to kick himself in the ass and, once again, show these lousy punks who feed off his leftovers what it really means to tell a horror story.