Vile and Viral

Dyed-in-the-wool good guys and pure villains don't have moral qualms. That terror is reserved for the middleman, General Billy Ford (Morgan Freeman). Ford's under General McClintock and over Sam Daniels, and is, really, the conscience of the story. The issues are examined not when McClintock and Daniels state their cases, but as Ford struggles to do right. McClintock has a couple of sound points: what's done is done and, end of the Cold War or no, we're not living in a peaceful world. Daniels has a good argument, too: innocent people should not die just so a few high-level government men can protect their careers. Of course, Daniels hurts his case when he offers to protect a select two. And he isn't naive; he knows that his research has been used to not only save lives, but also build biological weapons.

The real deal, though, is that this virus must be stopped. Ford knows, and he knows that Daniels knows, that if the only way to stop the virus is to drop a bomb and vaporize 2,600 Californians, then that's the only course of action.

Is dropping bombs the only answer? Is that the only way to stop the deadly Motaba virus? And, if Motaba is stopped, are there more where it came from? These are the sort of questions that make Outbreak a suspense film.

Motaba is fictional. But it's based on a real virus: Ebola Zaire, a killer from Africa that almost got loose in the posh suburbs of Virginia. And because it's based on "scientific fact," Outbreakis fueled by the same juice as '50s atomic-theme movies -- the fear that in our rush toward technology, or development, we'll go too far and end up finding something that will turn around and destroy us all. As we push into the jungles of central Africa and the South American rain forest, we discover microscopic pathogens that could make the Black Death look like a bad allergic reaction. It's the sort of thing that can keep you up nights. But it's also the sort of thing that can make for good entertainment.

Outbreak.
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen.
With Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo and Morgan Freeman.
Rated R.
128 minutes.