An excerpt from my script review for Quarantine (2008) which will be available 04/13/20:
4.) Dialogue and Description
The dialogue was fine for this type of project.
Would Quarantine win major awards for Best Screenplay? Probably not because it’s not Sorkin-esque level back and forth, but did what was asked of it for the job required.
My favorite line was around page 52:
LAWRENCE
No, that’s before symptoms start
showing. Once symptoms start,
rabies is one hundred percent fatal.
Mentioned above in the plot section, that seems to be absolutely true! And with this having a basis in truth (albeit a much faster acting form of rabies) it makes shit like this all the more scary.
The other thing I enjoyed, because my pansy ass didn’t have to actually watch it onscreen, were the visuals.
This script had some cool and audience satisfying shots that were more than simple jump scares.
Page 56 – A group of characters rush to help another guy who’s being attacked by a rabid dog from the building. They arrive a second too late as elevator doors close, and are forced to listen to the guy die an agonizing death. Technically more an audio than a visual, it’s still painful to watch these characters suffer through not being able to save one of their own.
Page 78 – Jake, our hero armed with a sledgehammer, cracks an infected Mrs. Izquierdo twice in the head to escape her apartment. I imagined the wet “smack” this would make, both sledgehammer to skull, and wet, infected body slammed to the ground.
Page 84 – And this one gets double points, is Sadie chewing off her fingers. She lies about being bitten once safe with some others inside an office, and we’re treated to one of her nervous character traits of chewing her fingernails. Instead of unveiling the fact that she is indeed infected the same way as everyone else, she looks slightly worse than normal and has chewed two of her fingers down to stubs without even realizing it.
This last one is just fantastic because it builds on what was previously mentioned and toys with the reader/audience about is she or isn’t she infected.
Page 103 – The most well known scene from the film is the closing shot, a night vision shot of Angela being dragged into the black abyss, the last of our characters going to her doom.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
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