Reel Politique: Movie Review, The Theme of Quarantine
Not to get all sociological on you, but I’ve noticed a few trends in movie content of late. The least significant, and most boring, is the college-set comedy-drama, a sub-set that includes the “ironically” titled Smart People, with Juno star Ellen Page, and The Visitor , the sluggish, airless new drama from the director of The Station Agent and Starting Out in the Evening .
But a more interesting new trend is the “quarantine” movie. This is a film that posits the arrival of some aggressive and murderous agent or a grave disease that necessitates the isolation of a building, town, or country. The recent, derivative action film Doomsday kicked off the trend, with its premise that Scotland is the sealed-off land of disease-spreaders, within whose walls no one 
knows what goes on. And there is even a comedy variation, in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay , the sequel to the popular (on DVD, anyway) pot comedy, although the humor is more cloacal than cannabis oriented, and the boys only spend about five minutes of screen time actually in Guantanamo Bay.
A forthcoming thriller is even called Quarantine and concerns an apartment building in Los Angeles sealed off by the CDC with firemen and a news crew trapped inside (this film comes out in October). Finally, there is the A&E channel remake of Michael Crichton’s tale, The Andromeda Strain, produced by Ridley and Tony Scott, starring Benjamin Bratt and Christa Miller, and to be aired in late May. The four-hour miniseries updates the Crichton novel (filmed once before) with some X-Files governmental paranoia, but is sluggish and talky, though the production values are high for a TV show. It lacks the suspense of the similar Outbreak. Blindness, meanwhile, has a high pedigree: from a novel by Jose Saramago , and directed by Fernando Meirelles, it stars indie standbys Julianne Moore, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Mark Ruffalo as residents of a location afflicted by an epidemic of blindness that leads to a vast quarantine (it comes out in September).
Why the sudden interest in enforced confinement? The subject is easy to trace as a cinematic trope, at least back to recent zombie movies such as 28 Weeks Later and Land of the Dead and more obscure recent movies such as Right At Your Door. On the higher ideological level, perhaps the theme is born of post 9/11 anxieties, in which Americans suddenly feel isolated, no longer jet-setters but lepers and pariahs on the global stage. Or maybe the theme speaks to a fear of being reduced to Medieval living, as the economy tanks and a feral society seems just around the corner.
Perhaps the theme is born of guilt. The American imperial juggernaut is out of control, and the people are either indifferent to it or helpless to stop it. A guilt-induced wish to simply withdraw into a shell may be reflected in these films, with the uneasiness of such isolation reflected in the fact that such tales are rooted in the horror and sci-fi genres.