Warning Sign

Recently, another new-to-me movie started showing up in the FXM rotation: Warning Sign. It sounded interesting, so I recorded it. Since it's going to be on again tomorrow at 1:20 PM (and again on Sunday, I believe), I recently watched it to do a post on it here.

There's an introductory scene of researchers in a sealed lab at Biotek Agronomics, a company in isolated southern Utah ostensibly doing research on increasing crop yields. Apparently they're working on something dangerous as everybody in the lab is in full hazmat gear with what loks like an external air supply. Some of the test tubes have adhesive on them in a way they probably shouldn't have, as one of the researchers brushes his sleeve against one of the tubes and picks it up, which he can't tell since the protective gear is so bulky that nobody would be able to feel anything.

If that isn't bad enough, the scientists do something profoundly stupid. They've apparently just made a breakthrough, and the head of the crew, Dr. Nielsen (Richard Dysart) wants to get a photo of the crew. He can't get a good enough one with all of the protective equipment on, so he makes the massively stupid decision to breach protocol and have the folks take off the helmet part of their gear. Sure enough, somebody steps on the vial and breaks it, releasing a toxin that's going to kill them all.

Now that there's been a release, it needs to be contained, and stat. Joanie Morse (Kathleen Quinlan) plays the main security guard, whose job it is to implement the containment protocol, which is unsurprisingly very restrictive and frightens everybody in the building, not just the folks on Dr. Nielsen's project. The protocal also sends out an automatic call to Maj. Connolly (Yaphet Kotto), who is from the military, which should give you a clue as to what the research was really about.

The containment protocol locks everybody, including Joanie, into the building, and with good reason: what Nielsen was doing wasn't simple agricultural research, but gain-of-function research on biological weapons. Specifically, this one is supposed to be an airborne pathogen that will trigger the parts of the brain that induce rage. So while at first everybody appears to be dead, they actually wake up as homicidal maniacs! No wonder the military wants the fruits of this research.

But while the containment protocol locks people into the building who would dearly love to get out, it also locks everybody else in town out of the building. This includes the sheriff, Cal Morse (Sam Waterston), who, as you might be able to guess from the name, is married to one Joanie Morse. Thankfully he's able to communicate with her inside the building, but he's also got the problem of trying to stop the crowd from breaking into the building, as that would release the pathogen.

So now you've got everybody in the building going mad, with one exception, that being Joanie. Apparently she's got some sort of immunity, but how? Dr. Fairchild (Jeffrey DeMunn) is a man who formerly worked at Biotek and is called in to try to figure out the reason for Joanie's resistance. Fairchild is one of those stereotypical heterodox geniuses that are a staple of movies like this.

Indeed, as you can once again probably determine without that much difficulty, there are a lot of tropes from conspiracy movies running through Warning Sign. That's not to say that Warning Sign is a bad movie by any means; it's just that it's hard to be original. I will say, however, that Joanie's secret turns out to be just as mundane but original as we saw in a movie like The Andromeda Strain.

Also, while Warning Sign may be more on the entertaining and competent side (and it really is quite entertaining) than a true classic, it also turns out to be quite timely. It's always intrigued me how, going back to the 1970s, the conspiracy theory of the government acting malevolently against its citizens has been a common strand. But all the contrarians of the 1970s have become the establishment of today, and woe betide anybody who suggests there's a conspiracy theory. And Warning Sign is even more timely in its dealing with a government lab creating a virus and what is essentially gain-of-function research, ie. how to make this virus more virulent. It's hard not to watch Warning Sign and think about certain other, more recent viruses.