Hollywood Movies Featuring ‘Deadly Viruses’ on the Loose
Wikipedia has a page listing “films about viral outbreaks.” I count 134 titles. Obviously, the theme has legs.
A few of the more famous movies: I am Legend; The Omega Man; The Andromeda Strain; Outbreak; Maze Runner: The Death Cure; Resident Evil: Apocalypse; Contagion.
My overall review: ridiculous plots; fear porn; softens up the public to accept the notion of pandemics.
Manufacturing 134 movies on the same subject, you can sell almost anything. Zombies, toasters, alarm clocks that have long noses, golf balls from Mars, cave women with flawless teeth and perfect makeup and salon-sculptured hair and carefully engineered cleavage.
But in this case, it’s viruses.
At rwjf.org, there’s an interesting interview with Scott Burns, who wrote the screenplay for the 2011 film, Contagion, and the technical consultant on the project, Dr. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University. Here are excerpts:
Scott Burns: “Obviously I worked with Ian, and early on I also met Dr. Larry Brilliant, who was very helpful [and certainly brilliant]. I had seen Larry’s TED talk where he showed the Malthusian charge through the world the virus would have. I also worked with Laurie Garrett on the movie, because she had written this book, The Coming Plague, which was very, very useful to me in sort of teasing out how these things have a medical component, but they also have a social justice component and a political component and all sorts of interesting aspects of human behavior.”
Dr. Ian Lipkin: “I started very early with Scott. There were a lot of people who contributed—CDC, WHO and others… Scott would bounce ideas off of me and others in his ‘brain trust’ and most of the time we were in accord. My role grew dramatically over the course of production. It began with just a consultation, and then I rapidly moved into helping the set designer in designing the virus, and we had a few days where we had actors come to the lab and spend some time working at the bench, learning how to pipette and look through microscopes and get into gowns and such. And even at the very end, I was working with the sound engineer, recording sound for the movie—lab background and that sort of thing. I did a lo
Article from LewRockwell
