Pandemic

  We had a few outbreak scares before COVID; Dengue, SARS, swine flu, bird flu, Zika. In films, though, save for a few prestige pictures (your Contagions and whatnot), depictions of pandemics always seems to come down to zombies.

 That's definitely the case with 2016's Pandemic; It barely goes into any detail about its mysterious illness, except that anyone infected eventually goes into a comatose state and then rises up as a blood-thirsty maniac - this is called stage 5. And as usual, no one refers to the infected as Zombies. That Shaun of the Dead joke really is evergreen.

It's a stage-5 infected, not a zombie. Completely different things.

 Humanity lives on, but after a few months after society broke down resources are getting scarce; Both early stages and non-infected survivors are desperate enough to sometimes be undistinguishable from the ravening hordes of stage-5 zombies. Meanwhile, remnants of the government still hold out in small safe zones and send out increasingly desperate military-like teams to gather uninfected test subjects to develop a cure.

 To be honest, the setup is extremely basic. Dustin T. Benson's script blitzes through it to focus on one such expedition led by rookie dr. Lauren Chase (Rachel Nichols). Her team consist of a sympathetic navigator (Missi Pyle), a badass veteran (Mekhi Phifer) and a douchey ex-con wheelman (Alfie Allen). Lauren is almost comically inept, and it soon becomes apparent she's not quite as invested in her nominal mission as the other soldiers (well, except the wheelman) are. The expedition goes to shit soon enough, leaving the remnants of the group stranded in an urban, zombie-infested no-man's land, and Dr. Chase free to pursue her actual goals.

 All scenes are shot from in-world cameras, with an emphasis on the cameras mounted on the helmets of the hazmat suits the team wears during the expedition. There are frequent changes of perspective, but director John Suits does a good job of making it feel more like a first-person video game than the usual found footage film. Not a first-person shooter, though, even if there are enough action scenes that you could make a case for it being a jittery action movie; As a whole, though, it fits much more snugly into the survival horror genre - the game it most reminded me of is semi-forgotten Ubisoft zombie horror game ZombiU (later rechristened to Zombi once it was free of the failed WiiU and ported over to other systems).

 There are a few fights against both survivors and infected, chases, a pretty tense cat and mouse game at a storage unit, and some abandoned building exploration. It's a good mix of situations presented at a steady clip, and the fairly relentless pacing mostly makes up from all the bone-headed decisions needed to place the team in unnecessary jeopardy. Almost everything in the movie feels second-hand; Don't expect much in the way of surprises.

 Going with a first-person view pays off in intensity and immediacy, but has the usual cost in legibility. Taking that into account, the action is fine; there's a standout sequence- a fight against a horde of zombies which has a couple of great moves (up to and including some parkour), but elsewhere it's a bit of a visual mess. The film's most tense sequence, meanwhile (the aforementioned abandoned storage unit scene) is so derivative it fails to have the intended effect. Still, it's serviceable, and the execution is fairly impressive for a movie this far down in the indie spectrum.

 This low budget, coupled with the film's ambitions, sadly means that it often punches a little too far above its weight. There are a lot of CGI blood and fire effects that fare about as well as you'd expect. Maybe a bit worse; Some of the blood and flames seem almost hand-drawn onto the images, like  the lightning effects in Hellraiser's finale, but much less charming. It's a violent film, but it doesn't go over the top with its gore; It's got the requisite zombie movie evisceration, for example, but the camera shies away from the Savini-esque carnage so lovingly lampooned by (again) Shaun of the Dead.

 The acting is decent, with the everyone doing what they can to bring some life into characters that are mostly resistant to such attempts. The music is pretty good, as is the direction - this is a much more stylish film than most of its found footage compatriots.

 What's crazy is that, as far as I can tell, Pandemic came out within weeks of that other first-person-shooter-inspired movie, Hardcore Henry (at least in the States). Comparing the two is like comparing oranges to Aristotle; One's an exhausting exercise in excess, the other's more of a 'real' movie. I think I prefer this one, but it's so wedded to zombie movie tropes I doubt I'll remember much of it after a few weeks.