Watching a prequel to a real-life disaster is no less than time travel via the screen. For those of us who lived through the COVID-19 pandemic, The Cassandra Crossing (1976) is THAT movie. Released more than 40 years before the earthlings will see a global health emergency, this prophetic two-plus-hour disaster thriller by George Pan Cosmatos leaves one wondering how on earth its plot materialized into the nightmare we experienced in the early 2020s.

In The Cassandra Crossing, the audience learns early what the people learnt later in the course of the COVID pandemic of 2020–2023: the U.S. government, specifically the Department of Defense, hosting a biological pathogen in a foreign country – which in this case happens to be Geneva, Switzerland (not Wuhan, China). The secret strain of patho...

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