Hacker Cinema
Outbreak
1995 · Film · 129 min
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
A deadly airborne virus finds its way into the USA and starts killing off people at an epidemic rate. Col. Sam Daniels' job is to stop the virus spreading from a small town, which must be quarantined, and to prevent an over reaction by the White House.
5 positive3 negative15 neutralfrom 23 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
24 comments on Hacker News
I've seen this movie before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbreak_(film)
(That maps shows that film location and many others, almost all right off Highway 101:
E.T. (1982), Outbreak (1995), The Tree of Life (2011), The Majestic (2001), After Earth (2013), the canoe chase scene from Last of The Mohicans (1936)...
Wow, apparently he's not wrong about the original eBay site being about ebola? He's wrong about the weird conspiratorial/xenophobic stuff of course, but it seems like the original eBay site probably had similar energy to this one:
"The eccentric engineer was obsessed with t he public-health system's inability to cope with large-scale health crises, particularly ebola It was around the time of the movie "Outbreak," so the idea of a pandemic was in a lot of people's minds.
After purchasing the domain ebay.com he filled the site with pages of ebola-related content.
So "e" stood for 'ebola,' and 'Bay' for 'Bay Area.'"
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ebay-got-name-originally-ebola-183413860.html
So one key is to not that not thinking the lab leak hypothesis is true =/= thinking it can be dismissed.
Because showing a zoonotic origin of a disease like SARS-CoV-2 is the work of years, if not decades, and with the disruption of the pandemic to research + the political ramifications of that work, it may well already be beyond us.
I think the reason there isn't an enthusiastic readership on the zoonotic side is simply because that's how people are conditioned to think about these diseases. Everything from movies like Outbreak to Contagion, the current fuss about the emu YouTube woman, etc. primes people to think about that. It's hard to foster an enthusiastic readership for what people think they already know.
It's also not particularly...sensational. There's no smoking gun. No shadowy conspiracy. The problems that emerge from zoonoses are hard and dispersed. It makes for very bad SubStack material.
It's not just propaganda, it's also the fact that a lot of what is portrayed in films is outside the realm of experience for regular people. People just can't tell what is realistic and what isn't, because many people just don't know.
Battles, gun fights ("it's just a scratch, walk it off"), stabbings, fights and so on.
Then there's topical films like Contagion, and Outbreak.
And then there are disaster films portraying tsunamis nothing like the ones we saw in Japan and Banda Aceh.
I found Outbreak a pretty poor movie and hard to sit through after watching Contagion first.
We watched the old movie "Outbreak" at the start of Covid, and was surprised that the term "social distancing" is used in that movie to describe mitigations we should use during the pandemic. That movie is from 1995.
As an aside: I particularly enjoyed the film Outbreak (Kevin spacey notwithstanding), it's a not totally unrelated plot to the linked theory. It's on Netflix!
> But more importantly, India has been contact tracing like a greedy algorithm on steroids since case #1.
So looks like India is doing in practice what they show CDC doing in the US in the movies, such as in Outbreak.
That's almost exactly the description of a scene from the 90s movie "Outbreak" where Dustin Hoffman follows a vent in a hospital to learn that the virus is airborne.
No one is saying you don't know how to watch movies! I could totally see how it would be possible to enjoy Outbreak as a fun action movie. Certainly there are plenty of movies I enjoy where the critical consensus is "meh".
I was just relaying my own personal experience with the film — it wasn't really what I expected, and as much as I love the silliness of 90s movies, it just fell a bit flat for me.
Perhaps my movie research skills are not too good. When looking for a movie I happily take on or look past the content built to appeal to a wide audience and enjoy the parts of it I find enjoyable. This is my explanation for thinking Outbreak is a great move, and perhaps a little fun and silly. Even ridiculous. But 'bad'?
Are we saying 'want to watch a movie about a virus outbreak'means needing near documentary accuracy with some components? I look at film as a total free for all artistic/author's thing. Cristicising with that in mind seems a bit.. I'm not even sure what to say. I would say yes lazy writing where gaping hard to follow plots or oddball scenes can be difficult but even those are sort of fun if you like experimenting with alternate mindsets. 'The Room' comes to mind. Not 'Room'.
To be clear I don't know anything about how to watch movies properly... so maybe I'm messing up.
Cheers
Are you really suggesting there's no criticism of the film on the internet? The film has a 59% on Rotten Tomatoes with plenty of criticism available there.
Personally, I watched it for the first time about a week ago, and was hoping for a movie that was primarily about a virus outbreak. Which it was, for the first hour or so. After that it became a generic (and comically over-dramatic) 90s action movie about the military being bad or something. I wouldn't say it's unwatchable, and it's definitely helped by its all-star cast, but I would agree that if you want to watch a movie about a virus outbreak, you're better off watching Contagion.
Really nice work, I'll share this around.
One minor quibble..."Outbreak" is a terrible movie, bad enough that I'd say don't bother with it. Some good actors, but writing terrible enough that it doesn't help. "Contagion", on the other hand is very well researched, with better acting. It's also interesting how many of the sub-plots and terminology are happening in real life, right now.
Wiki says a megachurch has a usual attendance of 2,000 people or more, so you are taking exposing up to 4 million people just to collect money.
It will take only one infected person in a church to spread it to a lot of people.
To me one of the scariest scene in the movie "Outbreak" was when the person sneezed in the theater.
Maybe, but with all the people stuck at home, it really should be on everyone's Netflix to-watch list. Fantastic movie.
Some other good picks relevant for these times: The Andromeda Strain (1971) Outbreak (1995) Contagion (2011) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978 versions) 28 Days Later (2002)
I agreed that people did not understand exponential growth, but I pointed out that "but it does not take a genius to actually understand the concept, especially if it is explained as right now you will get this many people per day, in a week you will get this many, in a month this many."
So if you explain to the politician, once you start getting cases in your country and give them the actual growth rates, and what slowing down the growth rates will mean, with nifty charts and so forth.
Like maybe they should do in the movie Outbreak where they have display of the red spreading across the country on its way to the White House, with a timeline animated below it, then the politician will understand the situation without intuitively understanding exponential growth.
I suppose reasonably competent data visualizers who have ever had to explain complicated things to non-technical people in an important meeting would know how to represent the concept in their particular domain without much problems.
on edit: changed our to your
The article seems pretty good to me, and in fact convinced me to watch the movie. Back then I had dismissed it as yet another disaster movie, a bit like "Outbreak" (the 1995 film).
For something like this, I wonder why the health workers haven’t started using those positive-pressure helmet hazmat suits. Like those from that Outbreak movie.
> things you can binge watch for a month?
this should get you through March :) ...
The Seventh Seal (1957) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050976/
The Last Man on Earth (1964) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058700/
The Omega Man (1971) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067525/
The Andromeda Strain (1971) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066769/
Dawn of the Dead (1978) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077402/
Outbreak (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114069/
12 Monkeys (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114746/
Cabin Fever (2002) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0303816/
Resident Evil (2002) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120804/
28 Days Later (2003) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289043/
Children of Men (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/
28 Weeks Later (2007) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0463854/
I Am Legend (2007) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480249/
Blindness (2008) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0861689/
Carriers (2009) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0806203/
Daybreakers (2009) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433362/
Black Death (2010) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1181791/
Contagion (2011) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778/
Maze Runner: The Death Cure (2011) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4500922/
World War Z (2013) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816711/
Maggie (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1881002/
Train to Busan (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5700672/
The Girl With All The Gifts (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4547056/
93 Days (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5305246/
Cargo (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3860916/
It Comes At Night (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4695012/
Rabid (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5628902/
The Hot Zone (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4131818/
edit: There is actually a Wikipedia page for the genre (duh!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_viral_outbreaks
Huh? That's kind of funny because it has been in the media since the 1970s. There was even a movie about an Ebola like virus in the mid 1990s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outbreak_(film)
It's always been out there, you just didn't notice.
But there's a further difference between the common cold and ebola: a cold spreads through aerosols, so all those kids standing around the sick one are breathing in live virus. Ebola spreads only through infected bodily fluids, so he'd have to be vomiting directly on the other kids for them to catch it. Usually by the time someone is vomiting or bleeding from Ebola, they feel far too sick to go on a fishing trip.
While it's possible that Ebola could mutate and become airborne (this is the plot of the movie Outbreak, after all), scientist believe it pretty unlikely. In humans, it preferentially attacks the gastrointestinal track, and virus loads are pretty low in the respiratory system.
So yes, averages do obscure specific circumstances that affect reality. However, the averages are low because the specific circumstances that would cause high averages are rare.
That's the plot of the movie Outbreak.
For a much more fun depiction, try Outbreak (1995) [1]
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114069/