The Bay

(note: I won't be identifying actors as thoroughly as I usually do, because I've decided there are so many characters, many of which are on screen for comparatively short periods of time, that I'm not easily able to figure out who the appropriate actor for each character is.)

Wow, this movie impressed me. The Paranormal Activity movies could take some serious lessons from this film. It’s presented as a mockumentary, giving us the information the in-universe filmmakers want to present us. Furthermore, much of the film plays out as a fairly realistic depiction of a major environmental crisis. The military never shows up to murder everyone, but the government and corporate interests still want to cover up their own liability.

We're told this story by a reporter named Donna. She's apparently leaking the story to the in-universe filmmakers, because she's been silenced until this point by the government. Apparently the filmmakers were somehow able to get their hands on her confiscated footage of the events, and are adding in bits of her commentary. I'm not going to do the research to try to figure out how much could be legally done to silence her in the real world. I'm so happy that the army isn't murdering the entire town that I'm willing to just accept this.

The film is set in a town built around Chesapeake Bay. The town's economy is based on chicken farming, which uses heavy doses of hormones to grow the chickens to edible sizes as quickly as possible. The chicken dropping are being dumped in massive amounts into the Bay. As the town has grown more prosperous, a Desalinization Plant is built to provide the town with water. We're told that the people of the town assume that the Plant will remove anything harmful from the water, not just salt. (Dun dun dun!)

The crisis begins at a local festival, where people begin vomiting and developing rashes and boils on their skin. The reactions are quite realistic. They realize fairly quickly that exposure to water and eating local seafood seem tied to the disease, and within somewhere between an hour to a day or so they've realized that there's a new strain of tongue-eating louse (a parasite usually harmful only to fish) that's making people sick.

It's in the final twenty minutes of the film when the CDC finally ties the hormone-filled chicken manure to the growth. However, the filmmakers have indicated that this was the cause several times. This is a touch I love. The filmmakers aren't saving up for a shocking reveal any more than a real documentary would. They have information, and they present it to us.

About half an hour into the film the ante is upped. We're shown a louse at least three-times the size of a cockroach that bites a man, and fish are being eaten down to the bone. We're even shown footage of a girl apparently being attacked and killed in the water, although we're told her body is never discovered. All the while the Mayor tells everyone that he hasn't had time to fully examine the issue, but is sure everything will be fine. His fear is visible, but so is his concern for his own reputation.

Is the science here realistic? Clearly not. The reactions, though, feel very real. We're shown various medical professionals scrambling to deal with an emergency. Whether parasites growing hundreds of times their natural size and attacking a species they previously had no interest in is possible is completely beside the point. Also, I doubt growth hormones for birds would affect insects at all.

The gigantic bugs are only on screen a few times, for fairly short periods. I don't blame them one bit. They clearly didn't have the budget to make them look particularly good, but could handle boil and rash make-up just fine. Their most dramatic appearance, crawling out of character's neck, the image is taken with a low-resolution camera so that the bad CGI isn't even noticeable.

If there is a major plot contrivance, it's the failure of the town to be immediately evacuated. People continue to go about their lives as the bodies are dropping, rather than immediately running for the hills. I'm willing to concede this, however, as tracking the infected as they scattered around the State and Country would make for a much harder narrative to follow.

Towards the end of the film there are two scenes of human-on-human violence. The first is an infected police officer is confronted by two men who try to convince him to go to the hospital, but the officer believes he'll die either way. I have mixed feelings for this scene. On the one hand, it is effective because the scene is so unique within the film, presenting a human threat otherwise absent from the film. The officer becomes belligerent and threatens the men with a gun, eventually shooting one of them. On the other hand, the scene is resolved far too quickly, with the officer then killing himself. It was like they just wanted the scene to be over, and not deal with the emotional fallout of making this character a murderer.

The second scene is the standard “someone in the back seat” jump scare. I have no idea why it exists, and it feels quite out of place. Apparently for this one scene being infected makes you violent. Maybe the woman was just in a lot of pain, but if that's the case how did she convincingly hide when she should have been screaming and moaning?

At the end we're told that the government killed the outbreak by dumping chlorine in the water, and then paid off the town in exchange for silence. This is one point that actually seems like the opposite of reality. Why would the government pay for an ecological catastrophe that was clearly the fault of corporate chicken farmers? I can certainly imagine Chris Christie jumping in to negotiate down their payments, but I'm fairly certain that the government had nothing to do with this, and would not be paying a “settlement” for it.

Even with these flaws, however, The Bay is a strong film. It's definitely worth a movie night.