A duck wings its way across the screen. Already this disaster movie is more promising than most: It’s not about a towering inferno, a capsized luxury liner or an airplane crash. The enemy’s invisibility demands a more credible TV depiction than any amount of expensive special effects or rubbery monsters.
“Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America,” Tuesday at 7 p.m. on KMGH-Channel 7, is guaranteed to unnerve even the most committed horror-genre fans. The ABC film is not only frighteningly topical but concise and well-acted enough to make one seriously consider hoarding.
An American businessman boards a flight to Hong Kong. Cut to masked biohazard teams wrestling chickens from the market there, the same sort of images we’ve witnessed on the evening news. The businessman watches as a Chinese factory worker sneezes. And coughs. In slow motion. He continues his travels to several countries.
Snap-zoom “CSI”-style into the microbes being passed: a glass here, a handshake there, a sneeze on an airplane – and off we go on a two-hour disaster ride.
Last week’s pronouncement by the Bush administration will echo in viewers’ minds as the death toll mounts in the fictional story. In case of a pandemic, the White House said, don’t expect the kind of federal aid that was available during Katrina. (The warning wasn’t intended as a sick joke, it only played that way.) Millions of Americans could be out of commission if an avian flu pandemic occurs, the government reported.
Enough scary reality. Back to the scary movie.
“We may be looking at the first human-to-human transmission of the avian flu virus,” says Joely Richardson (“Nip/Tuck”), as Dr. Iris Varnack of the Epidemic Intelligence Service.
She’ll have to win the support of Stacy Keach (“Prison Break”) as the secretary of Health and Human Services as they battle to limit the death toll. At their press conferences, they seem more humane than Katrina’s FEMA bureaucrats.
Ann Cusack (“Grey’s Anatomy”) as the wife of the American businessman and Scott Cohen (“Street Time”) as Virginia’s governor each evolve from fearful to forward-thinking, although even those character arcs can’t lighten the inevitably tragic, depressing tone.
Health officials say fear is a great motivator to heighten public awareness. And television programmers know fear is a great motivator to spike ratings during a sweeps month.
If you buy the “public service” logic, a movie that scares the daylights out of us may be excused as educational. If you take the more pragmatic view, this is a smart sweeps stunt that should amass millions of eyeballs to boost ABC’s future advertising rates.
So far, the ease with which the bird flu can mutate and be passed to humans remains in question. To drive home the toll, the film has us imagine something like a Hurricane Katrina hitting many cities at once.
The Avian Flu, or virus H5N1, is ripe for the 2006 May sweeps, like the African Ebola plague was in 1995 (for a movie called “Virus”). Oddly, TV has moved on from the horrors of 9/11 and terrorism to something even less visible. The stakes here are even higher, the threat more widespread.
John M. Barry, author of “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History,” about the 1918 Spanish Flu that killed as many as 100 million people worldwide, served as consultant on the film.
The politics are hammered, ungracefully: If we’ve known about this for a decade, why is there no vaccine?
As things worsen, emergency protocols don’t work, security breaks down, hospitals are overrun, food and medicine is scarce, there’s rioting in the streets. “It’s going to get worse. Much, much worse,” an expert advises. (Cut to body bags being tossed on a pyre).
The compounding tragedy is unrelenting. Searching for an element of humanity, anything vaguely positive as a turning point in the third act, “Fatal Contact” lands on the concept of people – people who need people. Rather than isolate themselves in fear, brave citizens come together to help one another. That’s as comforting as it gets as the flat ending arrives and the death count keeps climbing.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-820-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
