Product Details

• Released on: 1997-08-22
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: NTSC, Widescreen, Color, Closed-captioned, Full Screen, Import
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 128 minutes

From Amazon.com
When Warner Brothers was unable to secure the rights to Richard Preston's terrifying nonfiction book The Hot Zone (purchased by a rival studio), they took the basic idea of a fatal virus on the loose in the U.S., added Dustin Hoffman and director Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot), and produced an unusual thriller--a surprise hit--called Outbreak. The other picture, slated to star Robert Redford and Jodie Foster, fell through. The premise of Outbreak, which owes something to Elia Kazan's 1950 plague-scare movie, Panic in the Streets, is as terrifying as it is timely. As developers slash their way deeper into the previously unexplored tropical rainforests, they are exposed to radically new forms of life, including diseases, that in these days of commonplace international travel could turn into deadly epidemics almost before we know it. Hoffman's character and his estranged wife (Rene Russo) are disease experts called in to identify the unknown killer, which was carried into the country by an illegally smuggled monkey. The best sequence shows the disease spreading--through recycled air on a passenger jet, or a sneeze in a crowded movie theater. The final chase is pretty conventional, but the cast is terrific, including Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Donald Sutherland, Cuba Gooding Jr., J.T. Walsh, and Zakes Mokae. --Jim Emerson

Review
Morgan Freeman isn't the star of Outbreak, but his performance, and the legerdemain of director Wolfgang Petersen, make this noteworthy as a character study and a suspense thriller. Petersen, the director of Das Boot, In the Line of Fire, and The Perfect Storm, is an old hand at mixing characterization and action. What is pleasantly surprising about Petersen's direction (and the script by Robert Roy Poole) is how smoothly both manage a shift from a gripping, almost documentary depiction of the horrors of a biological weapon run amuck to a suspenseful, action movie-ish finish. Petersen -- through stars Dustin Hoffman, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Kevin Spacey -- shows the terrible anguish that this plague can wreak on a small California town. For more than an hour, Petersen illuminates the terrible choices the scientists and politicians face as the plague spreads. These sequences are capped by a powerful cameo from an uncredited J.T. Walsh as a furious and highly scrupulous White House chief of staff who forces the people deciding to firebomb the town to look at pictures of the people they will be killing. The action portion of the movie is more melodramatic, and perhaps less successful (Hoffman's banter with Gooding seems forced), but comes as a relief after the gloom of the first hour. As the general who helped launch the weapon and must contain it, Freeman shows the dilemma of a good man caught in a nightmarish web of events. ~ Nick Sambides, Jr., All Movie Guide

On the DVD
ccInteractive menus
Production notes
Scene access
Languages: English and Fran�ais
Subtitles: English, Fran�ais, Espa�

Customer Reviews

Stop that Virus!
Viruses scare the bejesus out of people who spend any significant amount of time thinking about them. Stephen King has written a couple of horror stories where humanity is essentially destroyed by the flu. "Outbreak" taps into that primal fear and elevates a killer virus to a status cinematically usually only reserved for tornadoes, volcanoes, great white sharks or Godzillas. In Outbreak a bad virus is discovered in a deep dark place, carried by a cute monkey, and attempted to be stuffed into a military pandora's box.

Wolfgang Peterson knows how to make a suspenseful movie as he proved with "Das Boot" and "Air Force One" and here he gets to work with a cast that would be difficult to reproduce today with Dustin Hoffman, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Cuba Gooding, Jr, Rene Russo and Donald Sutherland.

There are a few cliches in the film. Sutherland plays a stereotypical military general who sneers as he orders the death of thousands of innocents in the name of "National Security" - but he does it with skill and enthusiasm. Morgan Freeman dispatches a bomber crew with a speech that could have been replaced word for word with the same speech Slim Pickens delivers to his bomber crew in "Dr. Strangelove" ("I know you have reservations about what you've been ordered to do..... you wouldn't be human if you didn't....")

There are several light-hearted moments, such as when Hoffman's Colonel is out in a helicopter flown by Gooding's Major and they all but acknowledge that they are the characters-in-a-disaster-movie-tasked-with-saving-humanity. "I don't need you to get negative on me now", Dustin says after Cuba summarizes the hopelessness of their situation. "Affirmative, Sir!"

A movie worth watching!
Outbreak, brings to the screen the likely scenario that a deadly virus (similar to the Ebola virus) spreads rapidly endangering mankind, and threatening life on Earth. The likelihood of such a phenomenon is presently great indeed (as it always has been i.e. the Black Death etc), and hopefully the film will get many people thinking.
The movie is very realistic in its approach, and conveys a much needed message of the dangers facing people, especially when dealing with viruses (how easily many of them spread e.g. an airborne virus in an airplane or a movie theater). Moreover, one realizes how the government would have to act in such an emergency and the type of use of the military one should expect in order to protect the majority of people that have yet to be infected and contain the spread of the disease.
Dustin Hoffman, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, and Rene Russo, whose performances are simply amazing, make this movie one of the best of its kind.
The actors' great talent and chemistry clearly shows, thus providing a film that can be watched over and over again.
Resident Evil (Milla Jovovich) is another very good movie dealing with virus-related incidents/threats, though it falls much more under "Horror" than Outbreak, which is a more "Thriller/Action" type of film. Another movie that comes to mind is Twelve Monkeys (Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Medeleine Stowe), which is a futuristic/science fiction approach to similar virus-related threats to humanity.
In short, Outbreak is a very good movie, it's an eye opener, and very much worth watching!

Awesome
I loved this movie. That is all that can be said. That is all that is needed to be said.