Stars: Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman, Patrick Dempsey, Donald Sutherland, Kevin Spacey

Director: Wolfgang Petersen

Summary: An outbreak of a deadly virus threatens the population of Cedar Creek when it emerges from a rain forest where it has remained dormant.

In director Wolfgang Petersen's fast-paced, intelligently written thriller, Dustin Hoffman plays Col. Sam Daniels, an expert on infectious diseases who is called in to study the outbreak of a deadly illness in Zaire. He finds a virus that spreads so quickly it could wipe out an entire nation in just a few weeks, and he believes that it might have spread to the United States. With the help of his ex-wife (Rene Russo), who works at the Centers for Disease Control, Daniels tracks the virus to the quiet seaside town of Cedar Creek, California. His superiors' reticence to help begins to raise questions in Daniels's mind, and he must find a cure before a panicky U.S. army general decides to kill the town's populace in order to save the world. The all-star cast includes Hoffman, Russo, Kevin Spacey, Donald Sutherland, Morgan Freeman, and Cuba Gooding, Jr.

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When Warner Brothers was unable to secure the rights to Richard Preston's terrifying non-fiction book The Hot Zone(purchased by a rival studio), they took the basic idea of a fatal virus on the loose in the US, added Dustin Hoffman and director Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot) and produced an unusual thriller--a surprise hit--called Outbreak. The other picture, slated to star Robert Redford and Jodie Foster, fell through. The premise of Outbreak, which owes something to Elia Kazan's 1950 plague-scare movie, Panic in the Streets, is as terrifying as it is timely. As developers slash their way deeper into the previously unexplored tropical rainforests, they are exposed to radically new forms of life, including diseases, that in these days of commonplace international travel could turn into deadly epidemics almost before we know it. Hoffman's character and his estranged wife (Rene Russo) are disease experts called in to identify the unknown killer, which was carried into the country by an illegally smuggled monkey. The best sequence shows the disease spreading--through recycled air on a passenger jet or a sneeze in a crowded cinema. The final chase is pretty conventional but the cast is terrific, including Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Donald Sutherland, Cuba Gooding Jr., J.T. Walsh and Zakes Mokae. --Jim Emerson

Aspect Ratio:	Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Interactive Menus, Production Notes, Scene Access
Subtitles:	Arabic, Croatian, Czech, English, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Polish, Turkish
Year:	1995
Release Date:	May 11, 1998
Runtime:	123 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	D 013632
Keywords:	General, Wide, Screen, Drama, Outbreak
Genre:	Drama