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Virus shocker "pandemic": cough, bleed, die

2020-08-08T16:33:22.142Z


The South Korean disaster film "Pandemic" is already seven years old. Now it is coming to German cinemas due to current events. Unlike Covid-19, however, it is quite predictable.


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"Pandemic" leading actress Soo Ae (front): Brave virologist fighting the epidemic

Photo: Kinostar

One can consider it clever or cynical to bring a South Korean virus thriller, originally called "Gamgi" (flu), into German cinemas now, seven years later and under the title "Pandemic". In any case, it's an interesting experiment. How do pictures that we have known for months from the news and our immediate environment, pictures of panic buying in supermarkets and overcrowded emergency rooms, gigantically enlarged on the screen?

The dramaturgy of the film is based on the idea that a tiny cause can have a gigantic effect. At the beginning, the director Kim Sung-su shows how aerosols float through the air, at the end he revels in images of cordoned off city districts and mountains of corpses. In between, he tells how a particularly aggressive virus is spreading in a South Korean metropolis. As soon as someone starts to cough, they spit gallons of blood, often photogenic, towards the camera.  

The film is a sham: it says pandemic, it says epidemic. In contrast to Steven Soderbergh, Sung-su stages the outbreak of the epidemic as a local event in his virus thriller "Contagion". In a disaster film, however, that makes little difference. The principle that many characters fight against the epidemic and for their own survival in many places remains the same, whether they are from different districts or continents.

None of the characters have as much charisma as the virus

So there is a paramedic, a researcher, an illegal immigrant, the mayor and even the president. But in contrast to good disaster films, Sung-su hardly gives his characters interesting backgrounds and conflicts, but mostly reduces them to one characteristic: selfless, opportunistic, brutal. Nobody in "pandemic" has as much charisma as the virus. Maybe that's the way it should be. Maybe it's the main character.

Sung-su shows how the virus is gaining more and more power over people, as if he wanted to leave the path from thriller to shocker behind him as quickly as possible. This may also be related to the fact that epidemics have long been seen as a real danger for people in Asian countries like South Korea. The idea of ​​sitting next to an infected person in the subway without realizing it is unfamiliar to most Europeans, but not to many Asians. 

Sung-su doesn't like a subtle build-up of tension. It rumbles and crashes, right at the beginning there is a daring rescue operation that the director obviously copied from the Hollywood film "Speed". But from the middle, the "pandemic" becomes a victim of its own pace, the plot barely moves, the heroes are locked in their district and cannot get out, the film hits the spot at top speed. 

This film will neither increase nor decrease fear of the virus. Instead of going into depth, it goes into breadth, turns the epidemic into a spectacle and signals to the viewer with a wink that one should never lose one's good mood in the face of ruin. Now he has to measure himself against reality and in doing so he can only lose. Because unlike the Covid-19 pandemic, it is quite predictable.

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Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2020-08-08

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