I swear, I deliberately picked a movie that I knew nothing about, so I didn’t pick a movie about a potential world-ending virus intentionally.

This is less a story and more a series of images. The setup creates an initial illusion that this will be a tightly structured film about scientific process – an entire town has up and died, and the authorities react by rounding up a team of highly qualified people to study the two survivors and ascertain what went wrong – but it doesn’t maintain a speedy, plot-heavy intensity. The sequence of two of the scientists wandering around the town, studying the dead and trying to find survivors, is understandably slow; you’d want to really soak up the horror of what happened here as motivation to prevent it happening anywhere else (always have to admire any movie that has the spine to throw dead kids onto the screen). But the movie keeps that pace up for a very long time – the sequence of the scientists being inducted into the Wildfire facility shows the necessary process in an eyebleeding level of detail that, for the most part, does not factor into the plot. I know ‘it’s boring on purpose!’ is the worst defense of any movie, but I do see how someone could find this entertaining even if I don’t. It feels like the point of the thing is to take pleasure in the images just for their own sake; the movie uses more wide lenses than a cowboy flick, allowing us to soak in the lovingly crafted sets and costumes that even the characters fawn over. I have this suspicion that quite a lot of so-called ‘hard workers’ are actually people who happen to enjoy the things they do a lot, and part of my suspicion comes from my own particular trainspotting-like tendencies where I enjoy doing weird monotonous shit other people hate (I remember being one of the few in my film class in college who genuinely enjoyed editing), and I recognise those same feelings here. I do find the images cool; most likely I’ll end up stealing and reappropriating those images into a story that’s more dynamic.