Panic at Rock Island

Between us, Chris and I watched this movie on Sunday night. "Between us" means that I watched the first bit while Chris was tidying up the kitchen, then I dropped off to sleep and he filled in the gaps of what had happened when I woke up again ten minutes before it finished.

For those who might have missed it (and really, it wasn't the greatest movie), it's an Australian telemovie about a highly contagious killer virus that spreads like wildfire through a music festival on Rock Island (I think it might be called Goat Island in real life?) in Sydney. You could probably have slept through the forty five minutes I missed and not really missed all that much.

We were having a half-hearted debate about what kind of movie it was. Sci-fi? Thriller? Horror? Combination of the above? My position was that it was more science-fiction based, but Chris was of the belief that it would be entirely possible for a killer virus to strike (think SARS, swine flu, Spanish flu, Hendra virus etc etc).

I don't know. I have no doubt that killer viruses exist, but I think I'd prefer to believe they would spread far more slowly and be far less infectious than the Rock Island variety. Obviously the fast incubation period and easy spread from person to person that we saw on the TV was necessary to provide the most shock value for the prime time viewing audience. But I'm not up on the latest viral mutations either. Chris works in higher levels of health management than I do. It seems that in higher echelons of health services, they do sometimes talk about this kind of adverse event as a distinct possibility. That's a bit scary to think about.

The cast read like a roll-call of television actors from every single Australian drama series of the past twenty years. And I wasn't sure about Grant Bowler in the lead role. In my mind, he's become a bit too ingrained as a television show host/commentator to seem very believable as an actor anymore.