Contagion

Contagion
Review by Courtney Baker

Contagion starts with day two of an epidemic. You're left sitting there wondering what happened to day one. The film focuses on a small group of people operating during an epidemic of an unknown virus. A woman named Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) is the source of the epidemic. She spreads the disease to a few people, who spread it to a few more people, who spread it to a few more people, and so on and so forth. She spreads it to her son, and both die shortly after her return to the states from Hong Kong. Her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) seems immune somehow, and with the rest of his family dead, he’s left with only his daughter, who we follow as he tries his damndest to protect her at all costs as we follow him.

We then meet Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne), a doctor who is investigating and trying to solve the mystery of the unknown illness. We are introduced to Allen (Jude Law), a blogger who makes it his mission to get to the bottom of the strange sickness that is plaguing the world. Dr. Lenoara Orantes (Marion Cotillard) investigates in Hong Kong when her trip takes an unexpected turn. Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) investigates and prepares people for what’s to come before she gets a surprise too. Dr. Ian Sussman (Elliott Gould) receives samples in his lab, and even when he was ordered to stopworking with the samples, he continues research.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Scott Z. Burns, this movie starred a great cast. This included among others Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Elliott Gould, John Hawkes, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kate Winslet, all of which have been nominated or have won Academy Awards. The acting wasn’t the problem with this movie.

So many characters were hard to follow. This movie could have been better executed with less. This wasn’t the film’s only problem. Contagion was tedious. It took effort to watch it, even though one doesn’t really have to think about it. We’ve seen the story a thousand times on the news and television. Countless movies have been made about epidemics (no, don’t worry, this isn’t the zombie apocalypse like many epidemic disaster movies… okay, zombies would have been way better). We knew what would happen. The epidemic would spread. People would be afraid, and fear drives men mad. People would be trampled for necessities, any place that could be looted would be, and people would die. It happens in every disaster- alien, zombie, flu, hurricane, you name it. But one could guess that everything would eventually turn out fine. It was predictable.

I saw this movie in an empty theater with only one companion viewing it with me. The movie bored me to the point that I took the liberty of lifting the cup holders and making myself a couch to at least be comfortable as I suffered. I lost count of how many times I asked what time it was. I think it was somewhere around five or six, if I had to guess. Contagion seemed to last for an eternity- at least three hours long it seemed. The run time is 106 minutes. It got to the point where one wished the epidemic would win and everyone would die so you could go home. Just when you think it would end, they slap on another fifteen minutes with a prom scene that was totally out of place and finally the interesting aspect of the film: the movie ends with day one.

The camera work was fine, the acting was good, and the story would have been okay if it
had been done a little differently. There were interesting scientific facts and little historical bits to be learned from it. It was just boring and predictable. The credits roll and you run from the theater, happy to go home and take a nap after that tiresome movie. So just skip Contagion.