What if we lived in a world where the Bird Flu wasn’t all hype and ended up killing more people than falling vending machines? This is the basic premise of “Contagion”: a deadly virus spreads its way across the world and kills millions of people. This isn’t a far-fetched premise, it happened in 1918. The Spanish Flu killed between 20-40 million people before it petered out.
Star-studded casts are usually reserved for awful romantic comedies but “Contagion” pulled together more award winners than the Oscar broadcast. Laurence Fishburne is the lead doctor for the Center for Disease Control, and works frantically to find a cure for the virus. Gwyneth Paltrow is patient zero, the first one to contract the disease in Hong Kong and carries it to the United States. Matt Damon is her immune husband who watches the world around him die. Jude Law is an internet blogger who exploits the widespread panic to profit from the disease. Kate Winslet is the first responder sent to organize contingency plans and Marion Cotillard is the World Health Organization’s representative in China who gets kidnapped and held for ransom in exchange for a vaccine against the virus.
If this sounds like a lot of threads to keep track of, it is. But director Steven Soderbergh (The “Ocean’s Eleven” series), knows how to handle a lot of plot points. Each character is well developed and none are denied any screen time (except maybe Cotillard). When it’s necessary, Soderbergh isn’t afraid to kill off characters. Gwyneth Paltrow is the first to go in a death scene that is terrifyingly real and must have been a blast to act in.
And that is the driving point of the film. The way it’s laid out feels like it could happen tomorrow. Brian Williams could be telling America about a new disease by the end of the week. While “Contagion” can suffer from boring montages of empty gyms and gene sequencing, its poignancy in a world obsessed with hand sanitizer can’t be overlooked.
“Contagion” is the scariest movie since “Inside Job.” The acting is superb, and if there is one film that will make you change the way you live (or at least the amount of times you touch your face) it is this one. People with queasy stomachs should probably steer clear of “Contagion” but if you’re ready to become a hypochondriac, then I’d catch this virus.
3 and a half out of 4 stars
-Christopher O’Connell