Carriers (2009)
Written and directed by Alex and David Pastor
Trailer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0806203/

Probably one of the principle arguments for Paramount dumping the virus road-trip horror film Carriers onto DVD just before Christmas was to capitalize on the newfound fame of leading man Chris Pine, the rejuvenated Captain Kirk of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboot. Carriers had less impact in theatres than a common house cold upon its initial release. To be honest – there really wasn’t much of a release to speak of. The film didn’t even play in New York where I’d patiently been anticipating its arrival. Sadly, the film quickly sniffled into obscurity – until fate beamed up and cast Pine as Shatner’s heir to the command chair. It wasn’t until I myself was on a plane coming home from Dubai with fourteen hours to kill that I discovered the film on my roster of in-flight movies and decided to give it a shot. Not like there were many other horror movies to pick and choose from in economy class. This Abercombie & Fitch teen-ensemble shocker was it.

My argument to you for actually watching this film, however – isn’t going to be Pine.

It’s Christopher Meloni.

That’s right. You heard me. Christopher Meloni. As in – Law and Order: Special Victims Unit’s Christopher Meloni. Lantern-jawed, eggplant-foreheaded, switched-at-birth-with-that-other-character-actor-Elias-Koteas Christopher Meloni.

In fact, I’d like to go on record and argue that Christopher Meloni is one of our most underappreciated character actors around today, shackled to a quasi-memorable role in a ubiquitous prime time procedural. And I’m going to use Carriers as a shining example of yet another role in an ever-expanding roster of bit parts for Meloni that continues to testify to his surprisingly diverse range as The Best Thing about Most of the Movies Meloni’s Cast In.

My admiration for this man began with the surreal display of his (unbeknownst to me and most) comic chops as Gene, head cook at Camp Firewood in the cult fave Wet Hot American Summer. His off-the-wall performance seemed to be in direct opposition to the melodramatic broad-strokes of Law and Order, as if Meloni himself were subtly expressing his own frustrations with being pigeon-holed in a role that has carried him through two decades of prime time television. Compact that with the one-two punch of Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle and Harold and Kumar Escape Guantanamo Bay, where Meloni provides a pair of bit parts so completely bizarre, so utterly out-of-sorts with his weekly gig solving crimes of rapists raping rapists raped by rapists for NBC – suddenly it became clear to me that, below the imposing shadow of Detective Stabler, there lies an actor who clearly loves his comedy. Who can improv alongside the likes of The State’s David Wain and Michael Showalter and never flinch. Who can just about steal nearly every scene he hams it up in.

Such is the case with Carriers. But rather than add another bizarro-buffoon to his growing list of offbeat comic roles, Meloni goes off in an yet another completely different direction, offering up a restrained portrait of a father struggling to save his infected daughter at whatever cost from a virus that sadly leaves no survivors. Meloni’s performance is, by far, the best element of this otherwise interesting (if not ultimately flawed) horror film – and it is, by far, yet another reason why this man deserves our props as an unappreciated actor overshadowed by his most immediate and noticeable role.

Carriers itself is a chunky stew imbalanced by its niche ingredients. Blend certain disparate elements of the horror genre together, such as the attractive-teens-in-peril ensemble films of the ‘90s (Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend), alongside the trendy epidemic scare films of the ‘00s (28 Days Later, Quarantine), with a dash of post-apocalyptic survival horror (a la Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) thrown in for good measure – and suddenly you’ll slowly begin to gain a taste for the strange flavor combinations of Carriers. Pathos to pubescence is the name of the game here. Proving that even philosopher Joseph Campbell theories can look hot in a tank top, Carriers is a hero’s journey for the Greek system, a frat-style road trip movie where our hot undergrads encounter a cross-section of quirky (and infected) characters along the way.

One of the more surprising elements to Carriers is that the majority of horror has come and gone before the film (rather slyly) opens. What we are witnessing onscreen are the after-effects of an anonymous plague that has already wiped out the majority of mankind – all well before the opening credits. Infection spreads through the usual modes of bacterial-transport – saliva, blood. Breath. Those (un)lucky few left behind, like our four clean-cut college coeds (Pine, Lou Taylor Pucci, Emily VanCamp, and cutie-pie Piper Perabo), stay alive by distancing themselves from any or all survivors at whatever cost. Anyone is a potential “carrier” of this highly contagious bug, so better to avoid company at all costs. The ensuing loss of humanity amongst those pockets of survivors will be familiar to anyone who’s seen an epidemic/survival horror film from The Road Warrior on. Looting, lynching, and shooting-first are all common practices between fellow travelers nowadays. How our quartet of travelers has miraculously survived in the face of every-man-for-themselves marshal law, let alone near-extinction, is beyond the point. These kids are just about the hottest things this side of the apocalypse. Consider Carriers as the teenie-bopper antecedent to The Road, where the underlying question our hapless baby-faced travelers ask themselves, just as Viggo Mortenson did on his own walkabout through post-apocalyptic hell – Are we willing to lose our own humanity in the name of survival, dude?

One thing to admire about Carriers, oddly enough, is its own sense of restraint. What horror there is to witness in this film is through its survivors’ eyes. What violence finds its way onscreen is minimal at best. Innocently pinned with a PG-13 rating, this film prefers to display its terror in the passing tableaus of death, providing numerous drive-bys of ravaged neighborhoods – eerily reminiscent of those despoiled New Orleans quarters left behind in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Writer/director/brother-team Alex and David Pastor use our recent visual vocabulary of boarded up homes spray-painted with the tallies of dead left inside to find an immediate corollary to our present-tense sense of dread, successfully imbuing their movie with a level of unease that ultimately trumps the more immediate shock-tactics favored by most modern day horror films.

In fact, Carriers wisely chooses to strip away the familiar zombie-metaphor from its plaque-upon-humanity storyline in order to draw a clearer connection between the horror onscreen and our current horrors of the everyday. This plague doesn’t turn its victims into mindless rabid monsters. It simply kills them. And in a media driven culture that spouts the horrors of Ebola, SARS, swine flu, and the West Nile virus nearly every night on the six o’clock news, Carriers has something of a leg-up on its rivals in virus-based horror purely in its simplicity. Get the bug, get sick, get dead quick. Simple as that.

And yet – the one film Carriers most strangely apes is the bacteria-saturated 28 Days Later. Not on the zombie-end of the narrative-spectrum, mind you – but the final third of Danny Boyle’s film, where man’s-inhumanity-to-man overtakes the storyline and survivors are left to fend themselves off from none other than other survivors. Carriers chooses to isolate that section of Boyle’s superior film and extrapolate on its possibilities for a full 84 minutes, hoping to have 28 Days’ cake and devour it too… Sans the hordes. One scene could even be faulted for nearly replicating 28 Days’ rape-by-horny-military-men set-piece, the two films uncomfortably crossing cinematic paths for a brief moment.

But back to Christopher Meloni. Relegated to Carriers’ first third, Meloni’s subdued role offers a level of pathos uncommon for any film of the teen horror genre. Not that there’s much competition between him and his youthful cast-mates. Our gang finds Meloni’s character blocking the highway before them, the two groups suddenly stuck in a standstill. What we as the audience find is a father desperate for help, willing to do anything to save his infected daughter – an obvious fool’s errand, hopeless from the get-go, which only adds to the heartbreak of his self-imposed mission. The level of tragedy in Meloni’s final scene is almost unfair (and totally unexpected) for a film like this. I defy you not to feel for the man as he reaches the forgone conclusion of his character’s arc – one that arguably we could see coming, but feel affected by nonetheless. Or at least I did – which is much more than I can say about the rest of the cast. Carriers’ four nubile leads never achieve the sincerity accomplished by Meloni, regardless of whether or not they have the rest of the film to pout and whine over their need to survive. We as the audience not only mourn the loss of Meloni’s character, but the loss of Meloni from the film itself.

Ultimately, however – and here’s a little soap-boxing, so forgive me – the shortcomings of Carriers do not compare to the lack of faith Paramount had for its own film.

Hell, if you’re a studio head who just-so-happened to have some micro-budgeted horror flick collecting dust on the shelf that just-so-happened to share the same baby-faced star as one of the year’s biggest summer blockbusters – well, you’d be pleased to discover you finally had a chance at recouping some of your costs on said no-budget horror flick. Why even bother giving the film much of a release when you can simply sit on it and pray that one of its leads becomes famous in some other movie, quietly slipping it onto the video store shelf without as much as even a whimper of promotion?

It’s becoming increasingly aggravating how most major film studios have lost faith in their horror films. Originality is being sacrificed for repetition. Somewhere along the way between green-lighting a unique project and its release, executives tend to cut ties with their fledgling film (Carriers, A Perfect Getaway) by barely giving the film any distribution, only to watch it die on the vine before it even has the slightest chance of finding its own audience. They continue to play it safe by offering us up the same sequels year-after-year (the Saw franchise), recycling past horror classics (Friday the 13th, Nightmare On Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween) without even attempting to offer us up a new classic.

The true heartbreaker here isn’t that Carriers is a flawed film – but more that studios are choosing to dump such like-minded movies onto DVD, with barely a big screen release to speak of, while continuing to mass produce the run-of-the-mill remakes and sequels that bog down the genre and soften our expectations.

I’d take a flawed movie like Carriers that attempts to take risks and partially succeed than yet another rehash of Saw any day.