Carriers Movie Review

After a long delay and the new Star Trek vaulting Carriers lead Chris Pine to stardom, this post-apocalyptic thriller/horror is finally getting at least a limited release. When the film wrapped back in 2006 Paramount decided to shelve it, but what once seemed doomed to the overcrowded world of direct-to-DVD horror is now available in theaters for at least some of us.

Carriers picks up after a deadly unnamed disease has wiped out most of the world’s population. In the hopes of finding someplace isolated, four friends are making their way to Turtle Beach where two of them, brothers Brian and Danny, spent their summers growing up. They abide by a set of rules that is supposed to keep them all alive and uninfected, but the rules aren’t perfect, especially when you break them.

Contrary to what a lot of the trailers and media coverage leading up to the release would lead you to believe, Carriers is not a zombie movie. It does fall into many of the tropes set out by the traditional Romero zombie flick (small group of people getting by in a post-apocalyptic world, gun-toting survival extremists, scavenging the remains of American capitalism, etc.), but by cutting out a lot of the violence from the scenario, we are left with a film that focuses almost entirely on the necessities of survival and what the characters give up in exchange.

Chris Pine carries the film for much of its length. As the group’s de facto leader, his character Brian is a charming prick who does anything necessary to keep himself and his brother alive. The group’s motto, “the sick are already dead,” leads this film into morally ambiguous territory and forces the characters to make difficult decisions. In this world, if the disease doesn’t get you, the survivors might.

In the end, Carriers is not a great movie, but it’s not bad either. Certainly there are those who will enjoy it and those who won’t, but for most people it’s a decent way to kill a couple hours. For horror people and zombie fans though, it’s interesting to watch Carriers as a ‘zombie movie without zombies’ and to see the implications of that as a horror film.