I was always curious about this movie when I first heard of it. I had tried to read the book but I stopped halfway because of the utter frustration I had reading it. Not that it was a hard read, but because I was so furious at how the AIDS epidemic was handled and how we could've stopped it from spreading, but because of the Reagan administration AIDS was allowed to spread rampantly.

The movie version is very good at portraying that frustration, though not as thoroughly as the book did, but that can be forgiven. The movie shows all the road blocks that impeded the CDC from thoroughly studying the virus when the first cases started showing up. It seems while Reagan was building up the military for a war with the Russians that never occurred, America was left unguarded from a menace within. If you weren't a military branch of the federal government you were grossly underfunded.That's what helped AIDS spread, that and society's moral contempt for homosexuals. Those who considered themselves morally righteous called AIDS, or GRIDS (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome)as it was called before the heterosexuals started getting infected, a plague from God to wipe out gays, and since many off us were not accepting of gays we thought it would just kill them and leave us good, clean, God-loving heteros alone. But then AIDS infected, gay men started giving blood, back then our screening process wasn't built to detect AIDS so it slipped right on through and on to thousands of other heterosexuals.
So now since the "normal people" were being infected that's when we needed to take action, but all the government health agencies were still underfunded.

The first case of an AIDS related death was in 1977, a doctor by the name of Gerthe Rask from Denmark, who had done medical work in Kinshasa, Zaire where it is believed she contracted the virus, died of Pneumocystis carinii. The first case of AIDS in America was discovered in San Francisco in 1980 and the carrier of the virus was discovered to be a man named Gaetan Dugas, a Canadian steward who was later to be infamously known as, Patient Zero, the first known carrier of the virus (think of him as the monkey from Outbreak).In 1985, after Rock Hudson's death from AIDS, president Reagan finally addressed the subject of AIDS but by then 12,00o American had already died of the disease and hundreds of thousands of Americans were already infected. The movie addresses these issues quite well and brings out the names of the symptoms of AIDS before AIDS was what AIDS is now. However the most important thing that the movie captures from the book is the humanity of the victims, there are no gay stereotypes portrayed in this movie, every person who dies of the disease is a huge loss to the people they made an impression on. This is a very human movie and like the book deserves to be used as a reminder of what happens when we think ourselves better than others, because the reason why this disease was as successful as it was is because it wasn't prejudice, it killed indiscriminately.