Dayvee’s Reviews: Contagion

Break out the anti-bacteria sanitizer and start looking at your neighbor twice, especially when they start coughing. “Contagion” is definitely a movie that freaks you out within the first 30 seconds. From the opening montage you may even start to think that something is wrong with you and that you are getting sick.

Contagion is based on any society’s worst nightmare of an airborne virus that attacks so fast that the best scientists in the world can’t even get enough time to understand it. And just when they start to comprehend its formula, it mutates. Within a short period of time millions of people around the world die, including some of the big headliners of the film. The movie is spent watching the virus spread, watching the characters trying to solve the problem, watching helplessness, watching people trying to survive and cope. You’ll see some gruesome images medically, mass graves, panic, looting, random murders, it quickly gets scary in a very realistic way. Finally, there’s a cure; but the movie is not over yet. You can imagine chaos and immorality that follows as leaders try to vaccinate the world. Who gets it first? The rich? The politically elite? As the movie is spent following the path of the virus and its growth, the end does bring some resolution by showing the audience how it started in the first place.

Lawrence Fishburne is Dr. Ellis Cheever of the Center of Disease Control in Atlanta. He’s teamed up with Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle, The King’s Speech), as they are charged to find the cure. Sanaa Lathan plays Dr. Ellis Cheever’s wife, and because of his love for her, he takes a moral risk, gets caught and there are some consequences.

Gweneth Paltrow’s character Beth Emhoff will shock you in many ways. It’s not a spoiler to tell you that she dies early on. (It’s the same shock people had when Drew Barrymore died in “Scream”.) But Emhoff’s death does not mean that she is not still in the movie throughout, and Paltrow is still acting, but in a very peculiar way. Her character has many layers… dimensions that make her complex while not in a traditional way of being in a film. It borders brilliance.

Matt Damon plays Mitch Emhoff, Beth’s husband, who is left dealing with the loss of family while trying to survive and protect the rest of his family as the outbreak spreads, and panic ensues around him.

You’ll appreciate Jude Law as Alan Krumwiede, because his role is very relevant to the way our world works today with information, communication and the sources we actually trust to give it to us.

Kate Winslet as Dr. Erin Mears is a medical investigator, and the situation that her character goes through is used as a turning point in the film. Because she clearly starts as a vital piece to the storytelling, when she is face to face with the virus you then as the audience realize that this virus is something bigger and that no one is safe. It’s almost a moment of hopelessness.

From the onset, they narrow down the source of the virus and establish it came from China. That’s believable, given the history of viruses birthed there: SARS, the bird flu, etc. But something in me cringed knowing our financial and economic bind with China. I was nervous that we were going to upset or offend them with this fictitious movie.

A lot of highly confusing medical terms are used, and it’s done primarily at one point in the film. It makes me believe that the writers and director knew that it would go over the heads of the audience, but it was needed to realistically portray what would happen behind the scenes when there’s an epidemic. But all of the medical mumbo-jumbo wasn’t for naught. You will learn somethings, like humans touch their face four to five times a minute!

This movie also makes you think about what you would do in a situation where a highly contagious disease can kill you that very same day. Would you still help your neighbor, or is it everyman for himself? Will your survivor instincts take over in animalistic way overriding the human generosity that we are all think we possess?

“Contagion” comes off as a modern day twilight zone story. It’s not really a psychological thriller like I’ve heard others say. More people have compared it to the 1995 film “Outbreak”. I’ve never seen it, so what do you think?

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