I do like a good disaster movie occasionally and no I don’t mean video of our current government, but the sort of plane crash/earthquake/volcano/burning building sort of thing. There was a fashion many years ago for plane crash and hijack and similar dramas and during the late 70’s early 80’s not a year seemed to go by without some disaster movie hitting the screens.

This week’s Friday Night Movie offering is not one of the well known disaster movies from the period when such movies were popular but from much more recently. ‘Pandemic’, a TV movie made in 2007, is a pretty good tale of how quickly a novel virus can traverse the world and how quickly it can grip a city.

The plot of ‘Pandemic’ centres around a virus, brought accidentally from Australia into Los Angeles and the fight to stop it spreading and find a way to slow down the viruses progression. The virus in question is not one that I know of that exists but shares similarities with avian flu but has some characteristics of a haemorrageic fever. A passenger on a plane from Australia to the USA falls ill, as a precaution all the passengers are quarantined by the Centre for Disease Control, but the quarantine is not as secure as should be the case. In addition to that there is the complication that one of the passengers is a dangerous felon who must be watched carefully and, not to give to much away, plays a big part in the plot.

For a TV movie I thought that this was done pretty well. There’s some reasonably well drawn stock characters such as the prepper, the observer of the action, the good guys and the crooks and they all play their respective parts in driving the story along. This is a bit of a slow burner of a movie and takes a while to get going. At first I thought I wouldn’t enjoy it as it was a TV movie, but in the end I did. I hope you enjoy it too.