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Review - Contagion (2011) (includes spoilers)
A worrying number of the cast survive Steven Soderbergh's ultra realistic pre-apocalypse disaster movie, which concentrates on depicting how it would actually be, if, or perhaps when, mankind gets attacked by a super-virus - the kind that makes SARS or bird flu seem like an irritating sniffle. Clearly the paramount ambition of the movie is to clinically portray the development of the virus and its effect on mankind, using a set of familiar characters. Whilst this is certainly acheived, the movie lacks charisma. It suffers from an empathatic gap by failing to emotionally engage the audience because there are too many competing storylines that cannot be satisfactorily encapsulated into a normal movie format, and which would be better suited to a long running television series.
When mankind's jungle exploration releases a toxic animal/mineral combination, it metarmorposizes into a virus strain that renders Gwyneth Paltrow's past CV meaningless.
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This also releases a strand of the movie involving Matt Damon, who for some reason is immune, a fact happily ignored by scientists. Soderbergh tries hard to resist Spielbergisms (characters that tie in the audience using emotional blackmail and a hoovering up of all possible loose ends) but in doing so gives up the middle ground. Damon's story is going nowhere, and the same can be said of Marion Cottillard's sexy WHO virus expert, who gets kidnapped by desperate villagers. The ending of her story ends up on the cutting room floor, and so should probably have been written out altogether. This would have given more time to develop the Kate Winslet/Laurence Fishbourne strand, and especially the sequence with Jennifer Ehls as a Nobel Prize winning virologist, who ultimately puts a stop to the virus after it has decimated a sizeable chunk of the world populace.
Jude Law is happy to look foolish in a home made anti contamination outfit as a con man who claims a homeopathic treatment cured him of the virus. Presumably one side effect is a very silly Australian accent, but his performance, and indeed all of the acting in the movie, cannot be faulted. The film lacks the courage of its convictions however, and misses an opportunity to progress the story, perhaps linking it to previous material such as the beginning of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. Movie goers seeking an emotional connection will be disappointed, but if you are into the science then there is plenty to admire.
5/10 Clinically depicted
Review written by John Franklin : October 2011
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