Imagine how much scarier Jaws would be if Jaws could fly. And was invisible. And if he multiplied at an alarming rate and spread all over America killing every single American, and then set his sights on the rest of the world. It would be incredibly scary, and what's more, you don't have to imagine. This brilliant, terrifying film was released in 1995 and I've seen it about 20 times since. My commitment is testament to the genius of Outbreak – or "the Jaws of the 90s" as its director Wolfgang Petersen called it.
Outbreak is the story of the fictional "Motaba" virus, which is like Ebola only So Much Worse. First you get pale lips, red-rimmed eyes and a sweaty face, which represent horrible flu-like symptoms. Within a few hours you are stumbling around, coughing. Then you go into convulsions. Then your orifices begin to bleed, and bruises appear all over you as the virus LIQUIFIES YOUR INSIDES. Then you die.
To sum up the plot briefly: Dustin Hoffman plays an army epidemiologist who gets called to Africa to investigate an outbreak of a mysterious and deadly haemorrhagic fever. Returning to the US, he warns his bosses Morgan Freeman and Donald Sutherland that this is the worst virus he's ever seen. But Freeman and Sutherland are covering up a secret: the US military created the Motaba virus as a biological weapon and want to protect it.
And so the virus spreads to America, via a little smuggled monkey. A sequence of hapless characters contract Motaba along the way, dying horrible deaths and infecting their loved ones. Eventually the virus goes airborne in a small Californian town called Cedar Creek. Hoffman is determined to search for the host and find a cure; Freeman and Sutherland want to firebomb Cedar Creek and put this whole messy business behind them. The film becomes a race against two ticking time bombs.
So what makes it great? There's the preposterously stellar cast – Hoffman, Freeman, Sutherland, Rene Russo, Kevin Spacey, Cuba Gooding Jnr. It's the sort of megabucks billing which would normally suggest a turkey (think 2011's New Year's Eve but everyone pulls a great performance here. Hoffman is the browbeaten hero with integrity; Freeman the compromised official with a good heart; Sutherland the evil official with evil eyebrows. Kevin Spacey plays Hoffman's sarky colleague, and we know immediately he's going to die because he's the sort of person who listens to his Walkman too loud while eating cereal bars, and those are the disaster film rules.
In Steven Soderbergh's similar (but inferior) film Contagion, people die fast and clean. Outbreak's deaths are as dramatic and disgusting as possible. All the victims stagger about, reaching up with their pustule-covered hands, crying for mercy. When Kevin Spacey's character is lying in hospital dying and terrified, his grey skin covered in purple lesions, he cries tears of blood. Tears of blood, leaking out of Kevin Spacey's liquefying body. That's what I'm talking about.
Petersen does everything possible to ramp up the tension at all times. Acronyms of medical facilities rattle across the screen. The music is positively Wagnerian, with an occasional African drum interlude. There's a helicopter chase, a bombing, a scene where Hoffman jumps out of a helicopter on to a ship. There are tracking shots all the time, including the legendary tracking shot of a coughed-up blob of contaminated saliva flying into a stranger's mouth. Every time someone coughs near you in a public space you will think about that scene.
That's the thing about Outbreak – for all its silliness, it's genuinely chilling. As Cedar Creek falls, the army orders people to hang white sheets outside their home if they feel ill. The camera tracks down empty streets, pieces of white material fluttering outside every house in the evening sun.
Guinea is currently facing an unprecedented Ebola outbreak, with 78 deaths from 122 cases since January. The EU has pledged €500,000 (£415,000) to try and stop the virus reaching the capital. Senegal has shut its borders. Outbreak remains terrifying, because it could come true. Except that when it does, I don't think Dustin Hoffman is going to be able to save the day.
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