You’ve got to love the recent spate of post-Apocalypse movies that has hit recently, and though each one seems to have a different cause, they all boil down to the same concept.  We’re always out to survive, and sometimes, we’ll do what it takes to do so.

Whether we like it or not.

Carriers posits that the end of the world comes around by virus, a particularly nasty one that seems to be transmitted by infectees breathing on you.  I’m not sure it’s specifically airborne because there are actually uninfected people around, so just breathing the air doesn’t seem too problematic.  Meanwhile, we join a group of four roughly college age kids as they make their way toward the coast (again with the coast!) because they remember it from their childhood and it’s relatively abandoned.

Carriers is somewhat different in that the infectees aren’t themselves attacking the non-infected, but rather, they’re dangerous by their very existence.  This is definitely a novel approach; last time I remember it tried was The Stand and we all know how THAT turned out.

It’s an old theme come back in Carriers–man is the greatest monster, as he does what is necessary to survive.  Perpetrating tragedies and atrocities in sequence is all a part of life in this much darker future in which man lives off the scraps of civilization.

It’s a pretty good watch, too, and though it’s no less sad than The Road (the endings are really almost identical), it has more action and is a bit more engaging.

The Screenhead Ten Scale in turn gives it a seven out of ten for doing its job well, if not as well as it might have had it gone to a full R instead of PG-13.