Alex and David Pastor’s “Carriers” is another entry in the apocalyptic-virus genre, joining films like “28 Days/Weeks Later,” “Outbreak,” and “The Stand,” which was actually a miniseries, but still very similar. This film apparently sat on a shelf for three years and finally got a very limited distribution this year which excluded most major cities. After viewing it, the main thing that pops into mind is that it should have stayed on the shelf.
A mysterious virus has spread across the country and perhaps the world (it’s never specified). A small group of survivors, Brian (Chris Pine), Danny (Lou Taylor Pucci), Bobby (Piper Perabo), and Kate (Emily VanCamp), are making their way to a beach where they believe they will be safe. To help them on their journey, they have established a set of rules that limits interactions with the infected and calls for thorough sterilization of anything that has been touched by an infected person. With these rules, they hope to make it to the beach and wait for the virus to die out.
The major obstacle “Carriers” had before it was in differentiating itself from the films that I mentioned earlier. However, it chooses not to even try and instead includes all of the scenes that we would expect from a movie of this type. We can expect that some of these characters will get sick and that the others will have to make decisions regarding what to do with them. We know that they are going to scavenge for supplies in creepy, supposedly-empty locations, which turn out to have infected people in them.
“Carriers” ends up just being an exercise in taking these scenes from other movies, where they were done in a much better fashion, and splicing them into this one, but using different characters and locations. The fact that it is made up of material we have seen before makes it a dreary experience where there are no surprises to be had.
The writers had a chance to make it a film of their own through their characters, but they forgot to include any development, making the characters flat, cardboard cutouts that we never end up caring about. Their predictable actions only add to this. We watch as they try to emote during what are supposed to be pivotal scenes, but it’s impossible to connect with them because we’ve never been given a reason to care.
Another cause for not being able to connect is due to some of the characters’ really bad decisions. Several horror movies have characters like this, the kind that make you want to yell at the screen, but here, their decisions are obviously ones that will lead them to their doom, yet the characters are too dumb to realize it, destroying the chance of any connection with them and reducing the believability of the film.
Several scenes are choppily edited, making a lot of the action a confusing blur. Other times, it seems as if there are no transitions at all to the next scene which makes the film feel like it is just a string of random event connected together by a thread of a plot, which again, is one we’ve already seen and one that we can tell exactly where it’s going.
Ultimately, “Carriers” is an example of lazy writing and unoriginal thought. Perhaps the writers/directors thought they could make an easy buck by riding the wake of popular films of the same genre. Perhaps the studio realized how lazy and uninspired their film was and decided to put it on the shelf for three years, and even when they decided to release it, only give it the smallest of distributions, so that most people wouldn’t notice that this has already been done.
2/4 stars.