Australia can make good genre films, it's been proved time and time again - Mad Max, Saw, Roadgames. This was a strong genre exploitation idea - a virus breaks out on an island hosting a rock concert - but is not executed well. I got the feeling it was made by people who liked the idea of doing something genre but didn't know how execute it.
Biggest problem was story: the virus breaks out on the island and people look bad and throw up a lot and one or two even die... but that's it. I kept waiting for people to turn into zombies or for the government to start shooting the infected or drop bombs, but they don't. It never escalates. It's just people getting sick, and then more sick, and some die but some don't. It would have been easy to build the stakes in lots of ways - either they become zombies, or kids come off the island and so the police start killing them, or the order goes in to wipe out the whole island so the army's/evil corporation's complicitness isn't exposed... but there's all this pulling of punches
Characters act in silly ways. Mum Dee Smart runs an army blockade to be reunited with her kids because... Why? What's she going to do? If she knew the army were going to kill everyone on the island or she had a vaccine or something there would be some dramatic point, but she's really going on the island just to give her kids a hug which may be emotionally understandable but doesn't have much dramatic point.
Ditto when Grant Bowler goes on the island. Instead of, say, having him source a vaccine and there are people trying to stop him for whatever reason, he just arrives to say gday to his kids.
Also all these kids try to break quarantine to get off because they're freaking out which is understandable... then the police capture one and start thumping him which is even more understandable... and we get all this slow motion of the police thumping the kid and everyone looking on in shock, while I'm thinking "if that kid had gotten past I hope the cops would have shot him".
(And couldn't they have gotten music acts a bit more modern than Spiderbait and Tim Rogers?)
Then there are politicians who are opposed to Bowler quarantining the festival basically because they're... um evil politicians who are providing an obstacle. It doesn't make sense. It made sense of the Mayor in Jaws to oppose shutting down the beaches because the town's entire economy depended on it - here it's a rock festival in the harbour involving smelly teenagers. There would be far more votes in politicians quarantining them, surely? Or you have it say that the politicians are in the pay or the promoter or something.
The performances are all over the shop. Sometimes they felt right - Grant Bowler's dedicated scientist, Simone Kessell's stressed out scientist, Zoe Cramond as a crying victim - but other times it was hopelessly over the time - Vince Colosimo's leather jacket wearing army officer, Paul Tassone's yelly politician. Solid make up work and production values were ultimately sunk by too many people who were out of their element.
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