So here’s how that scene of the good looking kids in the car driving somewhere plays out.
“Twenty questions,” says the guy in the back seat. “Go.”
“Are you a man?” they ask. “Are you in politics?”
“Umm, dead or alive?” one of them asks.
“Don’t you think that’s a really stupid question these days?” says the driver.
Wait, what? Does that mean…? Are they…? Ah, I see. No flashback, no text crawl, no title card. The end of the world, established in four lines of dialogue. That’s good writing.
Of course, it’s not exactly the opening scene. The opening scene is home movie footage that pans to a world literally upside down. That’s good direction. There’s a fair bit of that in what should have been a low budget horror movie resting comfortably on its topical topic, but is instead a fantastic instance of character-driven storytelling. The name Carriers is a provocative title – I’m sure I’m not the only one who confused it with next year’s The Crazies – but it’s apt for a couple of reasons. This is a movie about the infected, not the disease itself. Like all the best monster movies, the monster isn’t the star. He’s just a plot device for good character development.
When Danny explains the plan to hole up at an abandoned Turtle Beach hotel, he says, “We wait until the disease dies off.”
“The disease or the people?” Kate asks.
“It’s the same thing, really,” he says, like he hasn’t given it much thought.
Although it’s mainly a character study, there are glimpses of the bigger picture. The armed gangs. The lynched Asian. The televangelist broadcast. Brian’s story about burying infected at the stadium and the garbage truck full of body bags. Gasoline at $12.57 a gallon. The failure of the medical community, reduced to euthanizing children. The last DJ in Corpus Christi. The beginning of the survivalist rapists (who will eventually cause Charlize Theron to lose hope in The Road). The political commentary and the bigger picture are here, but presented as a set of cinematic footnotes rather than grand themes or set pieces.
Like Zombieland, a similar movie in structure if not tone, these characters have established rules. And like Zombieland, the movie is about what happens when you break the rules. But unlike Zombieland, breaking the rules isn’t a metaphor for embracing life. This is a brutal movie about survival and the rules are no joke. Like 28 Weeks Later, the theme of this story is that compassion will doom us.
There’s even a sense that the disease has killed love. Bobby betrays Brian by hiding her condition. Brian then abandons her, but only after she’s already doomed him. Danny’s ultimate act of love is shooting his own brother after being too cowardly to face his parents’ death. Did he know they were still alive? He’s obviously haunted by his failure to face them. The arc of the movie is Danny being unable to go upstairs and get the gun to Danny using that very same gun to kill his own brother. The movie earns those lingering shots of the photograph of the brothers as children. In M. Night Shyamalan’s ludicrous but occasionally intriguing The Happening, he seems to want to explore the idea of an apocalypse that separates us. An end of the world characterized not by natural disasters or zombies, but by isolation, alienation, a global manifestation of the existential dilemma. Carriers is the movie that The Happening could have been.
After Bobby helps the little girl and gets infected, there’s a scene where she and Brian have a conversation (Is this when she infects him? Or is it later?), shot with one of them as a reflection and the other out of focus. It’s a bit gratuitous, but I have to admire the directors for trying. This isn’t just some dumb horror movie, played for thrills. It’s character development. Pretty smart stuff for what should have been a low budget horror film.
And do you remember the weird scene in 28 Days Later when they drive past the Van Gogh flowers? That’s managed much better here in the shootout on the road with the armed Christians. The road is flanked by huge yellow flowers, like something from a painting. It’s lovely.
Bad actors could have killed this story, so the Pastor brothers deserve credit for excellent casting. Chris Pine is 90% braggadocio, which works fine, I guess. I still kept thinking, “Hey, it’s Captain Kirk”. But he and Piper Perabo have great chemistry, which really makes their separation scene so effective. They earn it, and that roadside scene is more brutal and heartfelt than anything in John Hillcoat’s The Road adaptation. And as the movie progresses, you realize this annoying brash guy isn’t the main character. Instead, Danny has to carry the movie. Lou Taylor Pucci is a good actor who’s been given some rough material in the past. As Dennis Quaid’s son in The Horsemen, a clunky Seven knock-off, he had to do some pretty extreme and silly scenes. He got by mostly on his looks in The Informers, a clunky Bret Easton Ellis adaptation. But here he finally has some good material. He even managed to pull of the voiceover at the end of the movie: “It’s a beautiful day, and it shouldn’t be a beautiful day” actually works. Mostly.
A lot of end-of-the-world movies are about wish fulfillment. Getting to run amok in a mall, loading up on firearms, being able to call a hot chick on her bluff if she says she wouldn’t have you if you were the last man on earth, and so forth. At times, Carriers is no exception. Ha ha, Kate was a golfer. Whee, Brian’s jackass golf cart stunt. Drinking beer and speeding and spray painting your car! Is it funny or pathetic that they’re toting surf boards?
But unlike other end-of-the-world movies, the characters don’t carry shotguns and chainsaws. The tools of survival here are rubber gloves and bleach, sponges and face masks, mops, plastic sheeting, duct tape. The rules and the procedures are not glamorous. We don’t watch them and secretly admire how much fun they’re having headshotting zombies or hunting deer in downtown Manhattan from a speeding Mustang. Even the little doodles each character has drawn on his face mask seems like something from an earlier time, before scrubbing upholstery became such a rote task.
And look where it ends up. Danny is basically alone, separated from the one he truly loves, left with a girl in whom he has little interest (and who seems to return the favor). The cooler at the beach that used to have soft-shelled crabs is overrun with beetles. It’s all rotted, diseased, dead. The home movie – his memory – plays in his head and then fades to white.
And not since The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind” at the end of Fight Club have I been so transfixed by a song that plays during the credits. I love Nina Nastasia and her haunting ballad, “Ugly Face”, kept me riveted after the movie had ended.
Ugly face
Don’t ever make it again
It’s making me limp
In a wider space
I never noticed
The sharp turns that it takes
Careless mouth
Doesn’t deserve all the rhymes
That come tumbling out
It should starve itself
