I just finished watching The Hot Zone (obviously, I watched Outbreak back in the day – I think I’ve heard this referred to as a remake, which doesn’t make sense; it’s based on the same real events, yes, but they’re both fictionalized and thus don’t actually have the same plots, and this one is a miniseries rather than a movie). *ETA: Apparently it’s not a remake; there was supposed to be a movie based on The Hot Zone (the book by Preston) back around the time of Outbreak, but it never happened. My parents would have rightfully not taken me, an obsessively 11-year-old with a disease fear, to see it in theaters, but I remember watching it on TV later.
Having so recently seen the Chernobyl miniseries, I was pretty struck by how well Chernobyl did at making the characters’ motivations understandable even when they were doing things that, in hindsight and sometimes in plain view to everyone around them at the time, were phenomenally reckless. I came away thinking, “Dyatlov is an asshole and the political culture and structure of the Soviet Union in 1986 created the perfect environment for this disaster,” not “No real human would make a decision that stupid,” which…I found myself thinking multiple times during The Hot Zone. Part of that can be explained by faithfulness to the source (that is, the real events that inspired the shows) – ultimately, the creators of Chernobyl were going for verisimilitude and accuracy, while The Hot Zone was much looser even though it was in part based on real events – but most of it had to do with the writing quality. Not, I don’t think, the acting, though maybe Jared Harris could have convinced me that a rational army colonel would have taken four dead monkeys from a lab unauthorized, put them in the trunk of a car, and driven an hour down the highway while blood dripped from chassis. But…that might be too big an ask even for him.
Also – and again, maybe this is credit due to Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgard, but the exposition was handled so much better in Chernobyl. I understand that exposition is necessary for audience understanding when you’re dealing with the scientific details of nuclear reactions or hemorrhagic fevers. That said, it works more seamlessly when one character is a scientist who’s explaining a unique, terrible event to a politician who’s never encountered something like it before than it does when both characters are scientists, it’s still an ordinary day, and one scientist is explaining things in detail to the other scientist because…that was the day to do it?
I did just about die when Topher Grace’s character’s fiancee showed up and it was fully PAIGE FROM DEGRASSI, there to yell at him and then storm off!
And I was impressed by the makeup department, because they made Robert Sean Leonard and James D’Arcy look so plausibly old. Sometimes a young-ish actor is given the grey and wrinkled treatment and looks like he’s in costume. They just looked, well, sturdier and rougher than they did on House and Homeland. Granted, I’ve only seen season 1 of House and without Googling I don’t know how long ago that was, but damn they did a good job of aging James D’Arcy from the flashbacks to the present. Maybe there’s CGI involved, but when they CGI a young Anthony Hopkins on Westworld (which I started season 2 of with the HBO trial I got for Chernobyl, but couldn’t finish in the remaining days) it’s still pretty uncanny valley. Which is comforting, frankly, in the era of “deep fake” videos.
