The Carrier

The idea had potential, but I think it just missed for me. The pandemic has taught us that people WOULD in fact be idiots, and try and jump on a plane despite the risk to others. So the very idea of this film is a solid one.

The problem is the characters were bland and one dimensional, and I don't feel the film had any real focus, or real ending. Like there were some very good ideas going on, but they needed developing more, and the film needed more focus on deciding what it wanted to be. It started off very reasonable, but then just went flat.

The other issue I had is the acting was a little all over the place. Some points seemed overacted, where as other actors felt flat/stiff. I wish the film had more going for it, because the concept is a good one.

Certainly not less than a 6 for me this film and to be honest, in my opinion this is a pretty decent production.

Though I fail to see directly where the film's stated estimated £3 million budget comes from or goes as such, unless the cost of using the plane for the main set piece used a big chunk, nothing about this film indicates or shows it to directly be a relatively budget based film. As simply put the production values are great on this film.

The story is fairly solid as is the acting throughout for the best part even if a few dodgy aspects towards the end of the film. Though a better back story to the film would have been good to see even if to add just several minutes more to the running time. Yet another film I fail to see or understand the low average rating for as certainly 1 of the best budget films I've ever seen.

The world is going to hell in an antibiotic-resistant- plague powered hand cart. Soldiers are shooting people dead on the street and the suburban houses of the infected are set a blaze.

A bunch of people manage to get aboard a plane and make a dash for it. Locked in to a confided environment, with the potential of infection aboard and the world burning below, this is dynamite.

Production, acting and writing are sufficient to carry all this off and is very tense and moving in places.

Happy days?

No. The problem with this film is the plot. To unfold the way it does the characters have to make one shockingly ill-thought out choice after another. You know in horror films when the guy goes down in to the cellar on his own just to find out what that scrapping noise is? Well every single character in this film does this, about every six minutes.

This sounds nit-picky for what is essentially a sci-fi film; but it is so annoying it distracts from the film.

"Hey Gary I'm just going to pop out and have a chat with this guy who has been trying to kill us for the last twenty minutes."

"Right-oh Fred, want to take this gun with you mate?"

"No I'm sure it will be fine. Just sneeze into my mouth for good luck"

The ending reaches an appropriate climax but I was left wondering what was the point in it all.

Good acting and production hung on a distorted framework.

This sounded mildly intriguing so we gave it a whirl. How I wish we hadn't. It started off OK, but quickly revealed itself as a very cheaply-made straight-to-video formula horror/thriller. It looked as though it may have been a pilot for a TV serial that never got made (can't think why). Most of the characters are either useless and unreliable or just plain psychos, like 'Eric' who goes around wrecking the group's chances of survival. According to the end credits, it was filmed 'around the back of B&Q in Basildon' or something like that. Avoid.

There are some interesting little set pieces here that, at the very least, keep the watcher interested. However the big problem is that the writers have a basic concept of 'plague on a plane' and no idea of how to flesh out the story, the characters or how to end the film.

The action is wooden, the character motivations are strange, to say the least, random things happen like people turn up to shoot at people and then just disappear.

However the scene with 'the arm' is quite harrowing, the opening scene is full of suspense and the counter play with the other pilot is well done. Shame they couldn't knit it all together.