I would have to say the creepiest thing about viruses is some people don't consider them to technically be alive.
That makes them kind of like bizarro zombies. Well, except I guess bizarro zombies would be more like corpses that come back to life and restore brains to those who've lost them, such as flat tax advocates. Or maybe they would just eat our feet instead? I'm a little confused about how this bizarro stuff works. Point is, it's not very cool when you have to fight something that can't be killed because it has no life to be killed. Also there are hundreds of millions of them inside you.
-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.
Really, viral infection is the kind of thing you have to just not think about. Just like your car insurance bill or how long you've left your girlfriend waiting after work. The only real defense is a lifetime of locking yourself in your room and bottling your urine. So even when they're not straight-up horror, disease movies like Contagion are always kinda scary.
Gwyneth Paltrow returns from a business trip to Hong Kong with an illness. Within days, she and her son are dead, devastating her husband Matt Damon and baffling doctors.
With cases appearing worldwide, Laurence Fishburne at the CDC dispatches Kate Winslet to investigate. But with a high transmission and mortality rate, the disease quickly reduces the world to semi-anarchy. Without a cure, hundreds of millions could be killed.
Contagion is made by a guy who knows how to make movies. Of course, we all know how to make movies: just turn the crank on the side of that boxy thing and then yell at the actors until they cry. A blueprint for success in any field, really. Director Steven Soderbergh is equally skilled at making slick genre movies like Ocean's Eleven and artier stuff like Che and Solaris. After Contagion, the really question is what can't he do? Lift a 1,000 pounds, probably. But that may be it.
You've got an ensemble cast including John Hawkes, Marion Cotillard, Bryan Cranston and Jude Law. That provides so many stars that Soderbergh can just kill Paltrow right away like it's not even a thing. There are high-level investigations. A kidnapping. Damon's efforts to keep his surviving daughter safe. A panoramic view of the breakdown of society. And, for once, genuine uncertainty in the "Oh hell, this plague's gonna kill everyone" genre over whether, you know, the plague will kill everyone, leaving lone bad-asses to roam the deserts rather than sticking to the woods, where at least there's some shade and the occasional banana to eat. What are those guys thinking?
No single element of Scott Z. Burns' tight script dominates the others, leading to a thorough understanding of what the world's going through at the cost of any special connection to the characters. Damon comes close; he's immune, but his daughter may not be, and his struggles as an average man in a suddenly savage world are reasonably compelling.
If anything, though, Contagion is more about the spread of information -- true, false, and partial. And, surprisingly enough, it's about the spread of disease. You know how there's always at least one person in the theater who's coughing the whole time? Well, after seeing Contagion's sickies spewing and smearing lethal germs all over everything, you will want to club that guy who's coughing with a bat, then burn the bat. Then maybe run someplace where coughing is culturally unknown. No scene itself is especially scary, but Soderbergh makes it perfectly and painfully clear how hard it would be to avoid infection, especially before anybody knows what's going on. Which is a long time in virus-time.
Contagion is impeccably crafted and about as realistic as world-threatening catastrophe movies get. It's cold and effective, but not quite ambitious enough to be more than pretty good.
Grade: B+
* Contact Ed Robertson at edwrobertson@gmail.com. His fiction is available on Kindle, Nook, and through Smashwords.
