The Hot Zone manages to be creepy but not compelling in dramatizing a 1989 Ebola scare

The Washington Post

The Nat Geo miniseries starring Julianna Margulies "gives thoughtful treatment to its depiction of safety precautions and scientific concern, yet the dialogue and drama fall disappointingly flat," says Hank Stuever. "The real problem exists in some murky, made-for-TV zone between nonfiction and fiction. By sticking to The Hot Zone’s essential tale, this version remains a story of close calls and near misses. A full-blown Ebola epidemic never occurs, leaving the show’s writers too dependent on anxious monkeys that leap out of dark corners with their fangs bared at the Army personnel tasked with catching and euthanizing them. Six hours of that is about four hours too much. Where The Hot Zone briefly excels, however, is in its attention to prickly paranoia. As its story builds, there are lingering shots of futile caution, as characters reconsider door handles, itchy noses, cash exchanges, kitchen wounds and other sniffy, spattery, vaporous ways that humans mindlessly intermingle. It’s hardly a full-blown crisis, but it’s creepy all the same.

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• The Hot Zone saddles a mostly terrific cast with an unsustainable amount of both fictional and scientific exposition dumps
• The Hot Zone is good, and scarily effective at times, but it's not for everyone
• Julianna Margulies on wearing a 50-pound hazmat suit 14 hours a day: "I can tell you from my perspective it was torture"
• Margulies is glad The Hot Zone's movie version fell apart 25 years ago: “The story is too vast to tell in a movie"