If there was ever a genre of film that was overly saturated with bad movies it has to be the zombie survival genre. For every good movie, you have about twenty bad ones. Sadly, as a big fan of this genre I tend to watch just about all the films that come down the pipe (and that pipe is usually a sewer pipe).
So last night I decided to watch the film "Carriers" which is loosely tied to the zombie genre, in that they have one 'kinda-zombie' in it and a disease that starts to erradicate the population of the planet. I'm sure the filmmakers would tend to disagree with it being a zombie flick, but that just begs the question why they included one. I'm guessing to grab the crowd that loves zombies.
Basically the story follows four uninfected survivors of this disease who are trying to make it to a beach that the two main protagonists went to as children. Supposedly this beach is still safe and hospitable.
Well along the way they encounter more sick people, crazy people, and for some reason a dead Asian guy with the sign "Chinks brought it" tied to his corpse. Is that a nod towards the bird flu epidemic? Some people die, some live, but that's not important, because you never really feel anything towards the characters.
The directors (yes, there are two directors) don't seem to understand the human psyche, instead of showing the characters having real human emotions and struggling to survive in this new barren world (we never once see them eat, yet they seem perfectly fine) they choose to show odd scenes of joviality where they are playing golf or joking around in the car they're driving.
I found this to be the strangest thing, why play golf when you can forage for food, or weapons? I know if something like this happened to me, I'd be grabbing guns, tins of food an going somewhere incredibly isolated, not heading to the beach.
The biggest problem, aside from the detachment to the characters, is how incredibly off balance this movie is. The directors go from incredibly high moments to dark, deep moments without any idea of what a meaningful transition is. It feels like they take quick and easy cuts to jump around emotionally but with no real affect to the viewer.
I wanted to like this movie, I really did, it had some promising things going for it. The story was interesting, but the way it is told here is just too detached from any real emotions. I felt like I was waiting for something, anything, to happen and when it did. I just didn't care.
Score:
Acting = Pretty good, the actors do their best with what they're given, but the directing really shoots this one down.
Directing = The vistas look incredible, everything is wonderfully bleak, but when it comes to capturing any kind of actual human emotion - or getting the viewers to become attached to the characters they fail. Perhaps it's because there is just one too many directors here...
Final Thought = It's a decent flick, I wouldn't go so far as to recommend it to anyone for an evening of post-apocalyptic thrills. Instead go watch the much better directed, "28 Days Later", there you actually feel something for the characters and care what happens to them.