Saturday, December 19, 2009

Carriers (2009)

Rather too much like the grim final episode of a series about America's own final episode, rather than a stand-alone story with its requirements for plot and character development. Also rather too much like a Multiplex-friendly, genre-skewed version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

The casuse of the end of the world is better defined here — a flesh-eating virus (though the mode of transmission seems insufficient to have depopulated Texas so) — but the hopeful final destination of the seaside is much the same.

The two pairs of twenty-somethings whose journey this is are more morally-ambiguous than McCarthy's father and son duo, a state of affairs which provides numerous opportunities for testing just how bad they are prepared to be in a world gone bad.

McCarthy's vision was about as bleak as bleak can be, but the underlying symbolism was redemptive, such that you could engage with his protagonists and the insurmountable odds that they faced. Carriers (Infectados in Spanish) is superficially less desolate, but one suspects that in spite of its occasionally gripping situations, most audiences will be enveloped by the gloom of not caring that much about the outcome.

Grade: B(-)



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