The film, released by Warner Bros. March 10, 1995, was a box-office success, and Spacey won two awards for his performance. A real-life outbreak of the Ebola virus was occurring in Zaire when the film was released.[1] The film's popularity resurged during the COVID-19 pandemic, ranking as the fourth most streamed film in the United States on Netflix, March 13, 2020.[2]
Plot
The single biggest threat to man's continued dominance on the planet is the virus.
— Joshua Lederberg, Ph.D., Nobel laureate, Film introduction: Outbreak (1995)
In 1967, during the Stanleyville mutinies, a virus called Motaba, which causes a deadly fever, is discovered in the Africanjungle. To keep the virus a secret, U.S. Army officers Donald McClintock and William Ford destroy the camp where soldiers were infected.
Twenty-eight years later, Colonel Sam Daniels, a USAMRIID virologist, is sent to investigate an outbreak in Zaire. He and his crew — Lieutenant Colonel Casey Schuler and new recruit Major Salt — gather information and return to the United States. Ford, now a brigadier general, and Daniels' superior officer, dismisses the latter's fears that the virus will spread.
A white-headed capuchin monkey that is host to the virus is smuggled into the country. James "Jimbo" Scott, a worker at an animal testing laboratory, is infected when he steals the monkey to sell on the black market. Jimbo takes the monkey to Rudy Alvarez, a pet-store proprietor in the coastal-California village of Cedar Creek. He fails to sell the monkey after it scratches Rudy, who also becomes infected.
After releasing the monkey into the woods outside of the nearby community of Palisades, he develops symptoms on a flight to Boston, and infects his girlfriend Alice at the airport. Their illness is investigated by Dr. Roberta Keough, a CDC scientist and Daniels's ex-wife. Jimbo, Alice and Rudy die, but Keough determines that no one else in Boston was infected.
A hospital technician in Cedar Creek is infected when he accidentally breaks the vial of Rudy's blood. The virus quickly mutates into a strain capable of spreading like influenza, becoming airborne and causing a number of people to be infected in a movie theater. Daniels flies to Cedar Creek against Ford's orders, joining Keough's team with Schuler and Salt. As they begin a search for the monkey, the Army quarantines the town and imposes martial law. Schuler is infected when his suit tears, and Keough accidentally sticks herself with a contaminated needle while treating him.
When Ford provides an experimental serum that cures the original strain, Daniels realizes that his superiors were aware of the virus before the outbreak. Daniels learns about Operation Clean Sweep, a plan for the military to contain the virus by bombing Cedar Creek, incinerating the entire town and its residents, ostensibly to prevent Motaba's expansion to pandemic proportions. However, McClintock, now a major general, plans to use the operation to conceal the mutated virus's existence, so the original strain can be preserved for use as a biological weapon.
To prevent Daniels from finding a cure, McClintock orders him arrested for carrying the virus. Daniels escapes before he and Salt fly a helicopter to the ship at sea that carried the monkey. Daniels obtains a picture of the monkey and releases it to the media; a Palisades resident, Mrs. Jeffries, realizes that her daughter Kate has been playing with the monkey (which she named Betsy) and calls the CDC. Daniels and Salt arrive at the Jeffries's house, where Salt tranquilizes Betsy after Kate coaxes her from hiding in the woods nearby. When he learns from Daniels about Betsy's capture, Ford delays the bombing.
On their return flight, Daniels and Salt are chased by McClintock in another helicopter. Salt fires two rockets into the trees to deceive him into thinking they crashed. Once back in Cedar Creek, Salt mixes Betsy's antibodies with Ford's serum to create an antiserum; although Schuler has died, they save Keough. McClintock returns to base and resumes Operation Clean Sweep, refusing to listen to Ford. Daniels and Salt fly their helicopter directly into the path of the bomber's approach to its target.
With Ford's help, Daniels persuades the bomber's flight crew to detonate the thermobaric bomb over water and spare the town. Before McClintock can order another bombing, Ford relieves him of command and orders his arrest. Daniels and Keough reconcile as Cedar Creek's residents are cured.
Scenes in "Cedar Creek" were filmed in Ferndale, California, where tanks and helicopters were a common feature of daily life during nearly two months of filming.[3] Other locations used were Dugway Proving Ground and Kauai.[4]
Producer Lynda Obst has stated it was due to the production of Outbreak that her film adaptation of The Hot Zone was dropped by 20th Century Fox, despite having, in her words, "the better package and ... the better script". She also claimed that director Wolfgang Petersen tried to entice Robert Redford, who was already cast for her film, to be a part of Outbreak, based on Redford's call to her. Obst would eventually have her adaptation of the book, but greenlit as a miniseries by National Geographic, which premiered in May 2019.[7]
Release
Box office
Outbreak was a commercial success.[8] It topped the U.S. box-office list its opening weekend with a gross of $13.4 million,[9] and spent three weeks at number one before Tommy Boy's release.[10] It was number one in Japan for six weeks.[11] The film grossed $67.7 million in the United States and Canada, and $122.2 million internationally, for a worldwide total of $189.9 million.[12]
Critical reception
Outbreak received mixed reviews from critics. According to the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 59% of 64 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 5.7 out of 10. The website's consensus states: "A frustratingly uneven all-star disaster drama, Outbreak ultimately proves only mildly contagious and leaves few lasting side effects."[13] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 64 out of 100, based on 21 critic reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[14] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on a scale of A+ to F scale.[15]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it three and a half stars of four, calling Outbreak's premise "one of the great scare stories of our time, the notion that deep in the uncharted rain forests, deadly diseases are lurking, and if they ever escape their jungle homes and enter the human bloodstream, there will be a new plague the likes of which we have never seen."[16]
Rita Kempley of The Washington Post also enjoyed the film's plot: "Outbreak is an absolute hoot thanks primarily to director Wolfgang Petersen's rabid pacing and the great care he brings to setting up the story and its probability."[17]
David Denby wrote for New York magazine that although the opening scenes were well-done, "somewhere in the middle ... Outbreak falls off a cliff" and becomes "lamely conventional".[18]
Janet Maslin of The New York Times found the film's subject compelling, but its treatment ineffective: "The film's shallowness also contributes to the impression that no problem is too thorny to be solved by movie heroics."[19]
Scientific accuracy
The film's scientific liberties have been criticized, especially compared to the realism of the 2011 film Contagion.[20][21] Implausibilities include the virus taking only an hour, rather than days, to multiply; the synthesis of the cure taking less than a minute, rather than many months; and the injection of the cure producing immediate improvement.[22]
The film's popularity resurged during the COVID-19 pandemic, ranking as the fourth-most-streamed film on Netflix in the United States March 13, 2020.[2]
