Carriers (2009)
(On DVD, February 2011) One of the best things about Carriers is the way it wisely dispenses with the usual first act of most post-apocalyptic thrillers. As the film begins with public displays of bad driving and other asocial behaviour, the ultimate pandemic has already happened, leaving only a few scattered survivors fearing for their lives. While the tricks you in thinking that this is Chris Pine’s film due to a flashy performance, Carriers is really the story of someone else in their four-people group as they travel and see how badly society has deteriorated. There’s not much of a point to the film but a few disconnected adventures and a gradually decreasing list of characters: as another example of how nihilistic the post-apocalyptic genre can be, it’s hard to do better. Still, for such a low-profile horror thriller, Carriers is generally well-executed (some of the camera work is very good), and written with a few flourishes of interest: The misdirection in terms of protagonist is gradually revealed and (somewhat unusually for the zombies/infected genre) the film leaves behind more characters than it kills graphically. Heck, it’s probably the first time I have liked Piper Perabo in a film. While Carriers never becomes anything more than a disposable, redundant post-apocalyptic film, but it’s not too bad within the confines of that genre.