But if the fact that “a hundred million viruses can be on the head of a needle” is your kind of drama, it will certainly satisfy.Candace Cameron Bure Blasts "Cancel Culture" After Homophobia Controversy It’s not for everyone and that opening sequence will test your mettle for it. The Hot Zone is good, and scarily effective at times. Margulies is very good as a stern, coolly efficient scientist who has little patience with time-wasting men and Emmerich is one of the few actors who could bring depth to what is a thankless role. Some of this material would seem jarringly added to the main plot were it not for the cast. There are domestic scenes to add human interest to what is essentially a horror story about scientists battling each other, and bureaucrats and an actual disease. Noah Emmerich from The Americans plays her husband. Jaax is given a family life in this TV adaptation. Thus the meat of the drama is the built-in anxiety, not so much about the situation being dramatized, but the disease at its core. What makes the drama a bit unwieldy, mind you, is your foreknowledge that no outbreak actually happened in the United States. With that kind of information you are meant to be very, very scared. Early on, when Jaax takes a young, cocky colleague into that Level 4 Biosafety area, she says, “Do you know how many people would die on this planet if the leftovers of this freezer ever got released?” He replies, “All of us?” She acknowledges the truth of that and adds, “And there’s not a cure on the horizon.” A six-part TV adaptation makes sense, though, because there is plenty of time for the characters to emerge and for the gravity of the situation to dawn on the viewer. It’s a complex story that lacks easily defined heroes and villains. And one can see here why it never quite worked out. There have been several attempts to adapt Preston’s book as a movie. The slow unfolding of panic involves a great deal of office politics about who is a hotshot scientist and who is merely a bystander. Another underlying theme here is the inability of government agencies to admit the truth when it surprises them. Through Wade’s backstory, we get a sense of the brutal seriousness of the threat that is hanging over everyone.īack at the lab, a good deal of pointless argument is going on. Thus there’s a theme here about a female scientist not being taken seriously.īut the gist of the story comes into focus when Jaax calls in her old mentor Wade (Liam Cunningham from Game of Thrones) who is considered a renegade because he’s been obsessing over Ebola for years. Topher Grace plays a young scientist who is full of himself and sees Jaax as someone who panics easily. Her mostly male colleagues are more laid-back and skeptical. The drama plays out in fairly conventional manner. And in there, something very bad happens. In one long, formidably tense scene in the first hour she enters a Level 4 Biosafety containment area, which contains the most deadly viruses. She says to a nervous colleague, “It tears the hell out of the inside of monkeys, but doesn’t pass to humans.” But she knows there is something weird about what she’s been sent. First, Jaax assumes it’s a form of simian fever. Army scientist, is sent a sample of something – she’s not sure what, at first – that is killing monkeys that are kept nearby to be used for testing in various projects. What happened, as the TV version sees it, is that in 1989 Dr. Because while the miniseries is a thriller with plenty of danger, death and tension, it isn’t fanciful. One should emphasize the “non-fiction” aspect of it. The Hot Zone (Monday, National Geographic Channel 9 p.m., continuing on consecutive nights) is a new miniseries based on Richard Preston’s 1994 non-fiction bestseller of the same name. If you don’t have the stomach to see what a virus such as Ebola does to the human body, then walk away now. It starts with a very graphic scene that lasts several minutes.
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