Macabre…ish Horror Review: Extinction: Patient Zero
Extinction: Patient Zero, 2014/ 1 hr 20 min.
Scientists are to go beneath the ice to a hundreds of thousands of years old lake, in the South Pole. They hope to discover unique life forms. Well, that’s how it started. When they finally do find something, the mission changes.
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Drs. Jennifer Harding (Rebecca Blumhaven), Robert Cooper (Nick Stevenson), Malcolm Simmons (Corin Nemec) wake up on the floor of their safe room with alarms blaring around them, they had 20 seconds to clear the room before it locked down but they missed that window.
Now they have 70 minutes to evacuate before the room is filled with pure oxygen, then napalm and ignited. Everything, down to the cellular level, will be destroyed. Dr. Simmons, is out cold and there’s someone else, Army Corporal Carver (William Coleman), he’s out and has been shot but he soon wakes up.
The room is in a bunker, in lock down because of the containment protocol, so they can’t just walk out. They need two independent codes to get out and Simmons has one of the codes. But there might be a way out, Simmons, once said that only one code is needed if it is used outside the safe room.
Then Dr. Harding remembers the virtual personal network that can be used to contact someone within their network. So she sends out an S.O.S. and soon they get a response from someone known as Mr. Lang (Fabian Martinez), he explains there was an outside breach and security leak. He says there is contamination and he’s being very vague about whether or not they are going to be let out. Which thoroughly freaks Cooper out.
Dr. Cooper confesses to Carter that they create viruses. A weapon that could potentially leave an enemy’s lands uninhabitable for a few hundred years. It was meant to be a nuclear deterrent and now it’s a cheaper alternative to WW3. A designer, smart virus. And it looks like the cat’s out of the bag.
Mr. Lang calls them back with bad news, the facility was the target of a terrorist attack and teams are there investigating. Dr. Harding was warned, by text, that Carter is one of those terrorists. She is ordered to disarm and contain him. And she does.
When Mr. Lang calls back, he’s less than helpful and suddenly doesn’t sound like he knows what’s going on at all. Harding decides they’ll try to escape on their own. She wants to try to wake Simmons and see if she can get his code. They wake him up with smelling salts.
And Dr. Simmons has bad news. He says there’s no way to leave the room, they’re contaminated. He tells what he remembers about the gun men in the lab, shooting everyone. He tells them the only reason the alarms would go off is if it detected contamination.
But he knows what the gunmen were looking for and he still has it on him. Deadlier than ebola, there’s no cure, the little vile contains the extinction strain. A cholera, smallpox, botulism and bubonic amalgamation who’s sequence was completed 2 weeks ago by Dr. Simmons. The vial contains enough plague to kill three quarters of Earth’s population. This was a top secret program, within the program. He also has the only antidote.
Harding and Cooper helped to create it and never knew. But they work for a weapons manufacturer and probably should have known.
So Simmons, with 20 minutes left, decides they are going to stay and be evaporated with the virus to keep it contained. In an act of desperation, Cooper grabs the gun and demands the code. While they wrestle with the gun, Cooper is shot. Then Harding grabs the gun and shoots Simmons, demanding the code. She gets it and leaves. Leaving Simmons and Harding to fight each other and die in the safe room.
Once Dr. Harding’s outside, she starts to cough up blood and black fluid and calls her sister to say goodbye. But before she dies, some good samaritans arrive and call an ambulance. Just like that, the virus is out and spreads like wild fire.
This thriller was directed by Joe Eckhardt and has only four actors for most of the movie. And takes place in mostly one room. The actors were very good but this is more about the story because most of what happens is told to the audience, rather than shown. Not bad for what it is.