Carriers

Lightweight testimonial. Stephen King would have been delighted with this movie. I was impressed by the great atmosphere that swings between relaxed enjoyment and absolute despair. The cast is A-grade (Chris Pine rules) and the characters behave nice and realistically and if for a minute somebody behaves humanely, he is deservedly punished. Just one thing bothered me. I would have made the ending a little longer and had the rest of the crew eliminated too. But I suppose people like a happy ending. P.S.: Oh, I see now, Steve really was delighted with it, he even wrote something about it in an article in Entertainment Weekly. (11/29/2009)

Completely different to what I expected and wanted, but pretty interesting nonetheless. Instead of horror or thriller, this is a drama that hides an incredibly high potential and, unfortunately, hides it very well. The intense emotions are scarce and I only felt tension in three scenes, basically, they should have gone either harder or deeper, this is unsatisfactorily half way. Carriers left me with the impression of a sinfully squandered opportunity, but I’m still giving it three stars. It’s good, but it could be a lot better. (11/24/2009)

"The Carriers" is not a movie that I would describe as absolutely great, but it portrays the heaviness of the presented world absolutely brilliantly, and it gives you the right, depressing feeling that you should have from all of it. There are disasters and disasters, and this one is really bad because a really small mistake is enough and you have no way to fight back. You can't defeat this infection with a baseball bat. (10/05/2015)

An interesting antithesis of a typical version of a disaster film - instead of bringing together and restoring ties through a borderline situation, we observe the breakdown of friendship, the disappearance of sexual attraction and the alienation of two brothers (neighbors become menacing neighbors and not vice versa, as is customary in Hollywood). The film is composed as a series of disillusioning encounters that only deepen the feeling of hopelessness. Carriers is similar to Soderbergh's Contagion, but unlike Contagion, Carriers is only average in terms of film quality and is more like a TV movie in terms of the arrangement of some scenes. Nevertheless, the absence of traditional clichés and schemes keeps your attention - also because Chris Pine, as the main (anti) hero, is tolerably unbearable. (04/22/2013)

Completely mismanaged atmosphere inflicted by the carelessness of the filmmakers. I don't buy their bullshit about a horrible and deadly disease that is transmitted by breath, with everyone putting on their masks whenever they please, and you can clearly see that the gaps between the face and the mask make it leak like a hole in the wall. The plot (thanks to a pandemic when almost everyone died, four youngsters go to the places where they spent their childhood) is really stupid and also dysfunctional, because they keep meeting someone on the way. Of course, the main ills persist more in the first half. There we get mainly annoying humanism with a little girl. From the middle onwards (right at the moment when Brian walks his infected girlfriend out of the car) it starts to have some balls and the ending is even relatively functional. If you're looking for better films with similar themes, check out The Road, 28 Days Later, or Darabont's The Mist. (12/06/2010)