Pandemic unfolds during the zombie apocalypse, and a four-person team leaves their base to rescue a group of survivors, but one member of the team has a hidden agenda. It is supposedly shot in first person shooter style to appeal to gamers, and yes, you should read that last phrase as if I actually wrote, “which these days, the kids seem to like,” because I think of it as falling into the found footage genre, which I really enjoy.
Please skip Pandemic. There are way better zombie movies and TV shows. Mekhi Phifer was in one of them, Zack Snyder’s remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. The zombies in this movie are inconsistent. At the beginning, there is an explanation of the stages, but the movies’ depiction of them seems inconsistent with the explanation because it seems as if people are still attacking when they have their full faculties. They are smart zombies who can organize like guerrillas. It is possible that I am the problem, and I didn’t understand the movie, but I don’t think so.
There is one scene in which a person is used as a lure, but instead of clearly saying, “Hey, when you rescue me, start with my foot because it is tied,” she says, “You’ve got to get me out of here.” Duh, but they can’t do that if you don’t explain the problem. I understand not explicitly saying, “Guys, you should just ditch me because I’m a living, breathing booby trap, and they’re going to kill me, which I’m totally cool with because I just met you, but you seem nice so RUN!” Intellectually I understand that people don’t act rationally during a crisis so this interaction is feasible, but it is also cliché in a movie with rife with them. It is endemic, not a low point.
If you enjoy found footage, still skip it. The problem with shifting between multiple perspectives was that I was never sure from whose perspective I was watching unless there were only two characters in a scene. Again, maybe I’m the problem, and Pandemic is abundantly clear, but I don’t think so. At some point, I just stopped trying and checked out of caring since it did not really matter. The changing perspective simply acted as a conceit to make you pretend that you were not really watching a movie with actors pretending not to notice that multiple cameras are recording. It did not enhance the story.
I did not like Pandemic’s story. Even before the big reveal, I was not invested in the main character because she was dumb. She had to be rescued repeatedly in the first third of the movie. I have no illusions that I would survive a zombie apocalypse, but I know how I’m NOT dying in a zombie apocalypse: with my back to an open door in an infested area. Close the damn door. I never bought that she survived long enough to make it cross-country. Then when we discover her real agenda, which I hope was supposed to be obvious because it was, it had the opposite effect, and I liked her less.
The main character is actually the villain. I’m not saying that her motivation is wrong or not relatable, but it is selfish, and she put countless lives in danger before Pandemic even starts. When everyone who finds out her secret later cosigns her agenda, I was astonished. Are people generally this selfless, especially during a disaster? As for me, it would have to depend on multiple factors such as how invested am I in living and what I want to do with my life going forward into the zombie apocalypse because lots of people died so her motivation is not special, and I’m not sacrificing for her if we are in similar situations. When one person shuts her down and calls her out for lying, I actually cheered to discover that there was still one smart person who survived.
Pandemic has some good points. I did like the conversation about the class system at the survivor’s camp, but I would have preferred to see it rather than be told about it. I liked that when the team crosses the border of the survivor’s camp to the outside world, it is clear that not everyone being brushed aside is necessarily a zombie (although if that is the case, how is that person surviving among all the zombies….damn it, did I just ruin what little part of the movie that I did enjoy); however given that the characters know this, it makes the ending more annoying.
I know that the ending of Pandemic is supposed to be uplifting, but it isn’t. I do think that the movie’s fatal flaw is not showing us more about camp life before going into the outside world, which is basically a known quantity because of popular culture. There are allusions that unethical medical experiments are being conducted on survivors, and if you are not considered valuable, you probably won’t get proper treatment, then it is only a matter of time before that happens. If the last person standing somehow succeeds in slipping through that protocol, potential starvation or the worst, deadliest assignments lie in that person’s future.
I don’t care if you’re a fan of the cast, Pandemic is not worth your time. Phifer isn’t in the film that long, which is insane since he seemed to be the only one character that knew what was going on and seemed three-dimensional. He is also the most famous person in the movie. Missi Pyle isn’t usually in these films, and while she brings a dose of humanity to the movie, if you are a fan of her work, this movie probably isn’t your cup of tea. Game of Thrones’ Alfie Allen is unrecognizable in this movie. I am not certain that I completely bought his character’s story arc, but he always does good work so I was willing to let my doubts go. Rachel Nichols plays the main character.
Pandemic is not good, and it isn’t so bad that you will still have a good time roasting it. It is a flat nonentity of a movie that did nothing for me. So much work, so much talent, so much time devoted to a flat line of a movie. There is something so incredibly sad about the wasted effort.