Pandemic (2016)

Charming and brutal

A Disappointing Continuation

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Every zombie, or undead apocalypse is a bit different then the last, and this one is no different. A lot of the same, with that hint cilantro.This take has you go from first person (it reminds me so much of the House of the Dead movies), to third person often. Lots of blood and gore, some jump scares, and maybe a happy ending? But, does any apocalyptic movie ever really have a happy ending.Think about it though, in the end what wouldn't you do to find your family?Dr. Lauren Chase who is a member of the CDC, will find out just that.Dr. Chase, with a small group of others, is sent out to find and retrieve uninfected people. But, is she really who she says she is?Wink wink. She's not!

After I saw the trailer for "Pandemic" by sheer luck on YouTube, I just had to track down this movie and get it watched, especially since I am a huge zombie aficionado. And the trailer for 2016's "Pandemic" looked really intense.Well, at least the trailer was intense. The actual movie, meh... It was actually semi-boring, which was somewhat of a disappointment and a slap to the face. I must expect that I had expected a lot more from this movie after having seen that trailer.Certainly there were some good parts to the movie, and those parts had lots of action and a really great and fast pace to it. And that was really what held the movie afloat.This is not a movie that is driven by acting performances or by character development. Actually the characters in "Pandemic" were very mundane and generic, to the point where you didn't really care if they died or survived, and it didn't matter who died and who survived, because they were essentially the same character, just with a different face.The acting in the movie was fair enough, taking into consideration the limitations that the acting talents had to work with in terms of script and direction.The first person view that permeated the movie was a different but not entirely unwelcoming approach to the zombie genre. Sure it has been seen before, but it actually worked out well enough in "Pandemic".A zombie movie needs proper special effects, and honestly, then "Pandemic" was limping here. The special effects and CGI effects were not impressive to be bluntly honest, and that was sort of holding the movie back in a way.Putting the cards on the table, then I have to say that "Pandemic" was an adequate movie in terms of being entertaining. But it was far from being an impressive movie addition in the zombie genre.

This movies is not as bad as people are saying. It isn't a good movie. But it is watchable. It has an interesting, if basic, plot. The acting is actually pretty good for what they were given. Slightly shaky camera work but better than something like Blair Witch which made me so ill to watch that I gave up early on. But in this case, the idea is that the camera is on the helmet and should move with the person. So it makes sense. The frustration with this film is that it is so easy to see that it could be made into a film that is much better. The real problem seems to be the dialogue. Improve that, and the 'zombie' acting, then movie would really step up. Even so, like I said, a bad movie but a very watchable movie.

Let me start this review with two cautionary notes.1. Most importantly, I watched this on my computer monitor (thanks, Netflix) and it has a lot of hand held camera work. If I had seen this on a full size TV or, more especially, a theater screen, I might not have liked it as much.2. Always remember that the word processing software used to write screenplays for movies like this does not come bundled with optimism.That said, PANDEMIC was a very pleasant surprise thanks to a very strong script and some solid performances from a group of gifted actors. As is today's fashion it doesn't have opening titles, so I had no idea who the actors were. When I looked it up on IMDb I found that I have seen many of these performers on a regular basis for years.The story itself doesn't have many surprises. A global epidemic wipes out most of the population. Worse yet, the infected become monsters with a hunger for human flesh.What was a surprise was how involved I was with these characters. Lauren, the main character, is a CDC doctor working with a team looking for survivors and, ultimately, a cure for the plague. She has crossed the country to Los Angeles from New York to try to find her husband and daughter at their home in Sherman Oaks. She's a complex character with a dark secret, and Rachel Nichols's performance reminds me of Jodie Foster in films like FLIGHTPLAN and PANIC ROOM.I will admit that I fast forwarded in the early scenes, but once the characters arrive at a high school that turns out to be a deadly trap I didn't touch any buttons again.