Reporter Angela Vidal and her cameraman follow a team of firefighters in Los Angeles. In the middle of the night, a call leads them to a building where they discover an old woman covered in blood. When a man approaches to help her, she attacks him…with her teeth. Some time later, the building is sealed off: no one can enter it, let alone leave it! But what is going on in this antediluvian building to arrive at such security measures?
Eleven months (only) after the release of “[REC]” in Spain, its US remake, Quarantine, was released in the US. How could such a film be released so quickly? Well, the answer is simple: naturally, by repeating the original film shot by shot and adding very few new elements. However, the Dowdle brothers, “guilty” in 2007 of the incredible “documentary” “the poughkeepsie tapes“, are in charge of the direction and the script. At least, this is the official version, because unofficially, Quarantine takes up three quarters of the original work while Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza are only credited here as authors of the original film. What a rip-off! But what is really wrong with this adaptation?
At first glance, any remake very often loses in the game of comparisons and rarely does the second work surpass the original. In Quarantine thus shamelessly reproduces Balaguero’s masterpiece: the team of firemen followed by a journalist and his cameraman (very talkative this time!), the old building (here located in Los Angeles and not Madrid) with its dilapidated walls and stairs, its mailboxes on the first floor (and an elevator in addition but completely useless! ), various inhabitants including immigrants (here the Africans replace the Asians of the first version), and some kind of zombies – by the way very well made up – or contaminated people having decided to eat everything that exceeds the apartments.
The action is filmed in a subjective camera and, as far as sound is concerned, we have the right to the permanent presence of helicopter noises and police sirens. So much for the atmosphere! Let’s add to all this that the film is also handicapped by a romance thrown in when a fireman hits on the journalist during the 15 minutes of introduction! Ah, these Americans, real blue flowers!
In addition to this latent lack of innovation, Quarantine shoots itself in the foot when it comes to making its documentary side true because almost all the faces that make up the cast are too well known which, let’s face it, leads to a lack of immersion and empathy! So we find, in no particular order : the beautiful but here too much scream queen Jennifer Carpenter (the series “Dexter”, “The exorcism of Emily Rose”), Jay Hernandez (“Hostel”), Johnathon Schaech (“The doom generation”) and other “stars” of the TV like Rade Serbedzija (“24 hours”), Greg Germann (“Ally McBeal”), Steve Harris (“The practice”), Marin Hinkle (“My uncle Charlie”) or still Dania Ramirez (“Heroes”).
However, one innovation caught my attention and takes the form of a comical scene during a tragic event, which was totally absent from “[REC]“. I mean of course the cameraman who, in order to get rid of a stubborn zombie, finds nothing better to do than to hit him with his camera! Frankly too hilarious and completely unexpected! But well, it’s quite meager, especially for the lovers of the Iberian film.
Thus, neither good nor too bad, Quarantine is perfectly suited to an audience of Americans living in autarky and having never seen any other films than those of their great nation or to those who did not have the chance to discover the original film, the others will easily pass by, as this facsimile is an almost exact copy of the original. In addition to plagiarizing almost everything in the “Made in the USA” version, it has forgotten an essential idea on which the whole trilogy is based, namely the religious aspect of the film. And that, coming from the Americans whose propensity to sprinkle many of their films with misplaced religiosity is known, is surprising!
