Post by erik on Mar 19, 2020 21:44:37 GMT -5
It may have been released eight and a half years ago, but the 2011 medical science fiction thriller CONTAGION seems now to have become just a little bit too prescient in the way it depicts how a foreign-born virus can wreak havoc on people.
With a screenplay by Scott Burns, and under the concise direction of Steven Soderbergh (TRAFFIC; ERIN BROCKOVICH), CONTAGION shows how an innocuous act in Hong Kong caused by a businesswoman (Gwyneth Paltrow) on sabbatical there can spread upon her return to America, infecting only a handful of people at first, but eventually exploding into a health crisis the likes of which no country has ever seen. Laurence Fisbburne and Kate Winslet are the doctors based out of CDC headquarters in Atlanta who try to develop the appropriate vaccines for this strain, which, like so many flu bugs, has a genetic code to it seemingly meant to ward off any kind of medicine applied to it. Marion Cottilard is the French doctor sent by the World Health Organization (WHO) to Hong Kong to check the exact origin of the flu, which turns out to have been a combination of a rabid bat and pig flu viruses, causing convulsions, seizures, and, eventually, sudden death. Jude Law portrays a conspiracy blogger who contends that the CDC and governments all over the world have the antidote in their hands but are hording it so as to cash in on the deaths of what will eventually turn out to be millions of people. Matt Damon portrays Paltrow’s grieving husband who has to stand watch over his two motherless children who could be infected too, even though he himself already has the right amount of antibodies to avoid catching the strain. The vaccines that prove to be the most effective are eventually made public, but not before a lot of damage has been done, especially in the United States.
While there have been more than a few “virus” films over the years, including such much-lauded films as 1995’s TWELVE MONKEYS and OUTBREAK, as well as the 1971 sci-fi classic THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, CONTAGION actually seems to be he most realistic of them all and, as a result, probably the most frightening as well. The tendency to have the entire cast go into hysterics over people dropping dead like flies all around them is wisely avoided by Soderbergh. Instead, he opts for a docudrama-like approach, with numerous sequences of hand-held camera movements that make the drama seem as realistic as possible without dipping into technique for technique’s sake. The scenes in which Fishburne and his CDC team race against time and the virus to find vaccines that will combat its mutating strains are handled with a great deal of credibility, as are the scenes that critique the media and people in authority, in the form of Law’s conspiracy theorist figure. Cottilard and Winslet also do good turns as female disease specialists who, in their own separate investigations, try to track down the starting point of the disease, which is finally revealed in the flashback that comes right at the end of the movie.
Although there are those who will likely claim that the CDC is shown in a better light than it supposedly deserves, the point of CONTAGION, borne out by history (the 1918-20 Spanish Flu epidemic; H1N1 in 2009; Ebola in 2014), is that pandemics of the one that occurs in this film and that have occurred in history are not only possible, but practically inevitable, given the way that technology and travel have evolved, and given the everyday habits of people that can lead to viruses being spread around without anyone knowing about it until it’s too late. Instead of being another scary Hollywood shocker (though it is definitely scary), CONTAGION largely succeeds at putting up a plausible scenario for an infectious disease mutating into a worldwide problem in which a cure can’t possibly come fast enough. Furthermore, it also urges us to listen to scientists, and not political talking heads or science deniers, when it comes to influenza events like that depicted here. They’re likely to get greater, not fewer, in number in the future.
With a screenplay by Scott Burns, and under the concise direction of Steven Soderbergh (TRAFFIC; ERIN BROCKOVICH), CONTAGION shows how an innocuous act in Hong Kong caused by a businesswoman (Gwyneth Paltrow) on sabbatical there can spread upon her return to America, infecting only a handful of people at first, but eventually exploding into a health crisis the likes of which no country has ever seen. Laurence Fisbburne and Kate Winslet are the doctors based out of CDC headquarters in Atlanta who try to develop the appropriate vaccines for this strain, which, like so many flu bugs, has a genetic code to it seemingly meant to ward off any kind of medicine applied to it. Marion Cottilard is the French doctor sent by the World Health Organization (WHO) to Hong Kong to check the exact origin of the flu, which turns out to have been a combination of a rabid bat and pig flu viruses, causing convulsions, seizures, and, eventually, sudden death. Jude Law portrays a conspiracy blogger who contends that the CDC and governments all over the world have the antidote in their hands but are hording it so as to cash in on the deaths of what will eventually turn out to be millions of people. Matt Damon portrays Paltrow’s grieving husband who has to stand watch over his two motherless children who could be infected too, even though he himself already has the right amount of antibodies to avoid catching the strain. The vaccines that prove to be the most effective are eventually made public, but not before a lot of damage has been done, especially in the United States.
While there have been more than a few “virus” films over the years, including such much-lauded films as 1995’s TWELVE MONKEYS and OUTBREAK, as well as the 1971 sci-fi classic THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, CONTAGION actually seems to be he most realistic of them all and, as a result, probably the most frightening as well. The tendency to have the entire cast go into hysterics over people dropping dead like flies all around them is wisely avoided by Soderbergh. Instead, he opts for a docudrama-like approach, with numerous sequences of hand-held camera movements that make the drama seem as realistic as possible without dipping into technique for technique’s sake. The scenes in which Fishburne and his CDC team race against time and the virus to find vaccines that will combat its mutating strains are handled with a great deal of credibility, as are the scenes that critique the media and people in authority, in the form of Law’s conspiracy theorist figure. Cottilard and Winslet also do good turns as female disease specialists who, in their own separate investigations, try to track down the starting point of the disease, which is finally revealed in the flashback that comes right at the end of the movie.
Although there are those who will likely claim that the CDC is shown in a better light than it supposedly deserves, the point of CONTAGION, borne out by history (the 1918-20 Spanish Flu epidemic; H1N1 in 2009; Ebola in 2014), is that pandemics of the one that occurs in this film and that have occurred in history are not only possible, but practically inevitable, given the way that technology and travel have evolved, and given the everyday habits of people that can lead to viruses being spread around without anyone knowing about it until it’s too late. Instead of being another scary Hollywood shocker (though it is definitely scary), CONTAGION largely succeeds at putting up a plausible scenario for an infectious disease mutating into a worldwide problem in which a cure can’t possibly come fast enough. Furthermore, it also urges us to listen to scientists, and not political talking heads or science deniers, when it comes to influenza events like that depicted here. They’re likely to get greater, not fewer, in number in the future.
