Friday, 30 December 2011 Contagion (Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet) Posted by joeldfisher at 09:31

Coughs and sneezes spread diseases, catch them in your handkerchief. An old and trusted public service announcement that has probably helped a lot of snotty little boys and girls for years. These days, however, it's much more than just putting your hand over your mouth or nose to stop the spread of disease and I can't remember the last time I saw anybody under 50 with a handkerchief and even then it's a rarity. In 2005 bird flu swept throughout the world and a media panic caused all kinds of people to think that all flying creatures would spread a disease that would cause them to die. There were a few cases of this but nothing as widespread as was expected. In 2009 another virus spread across the globe, this time on a much larger scale, people did die and it almost got to the point where you didn't know someone who knew someone who had it.

Contagion is a new kind of disaster movie. Whereas before we've had alien invasions, natural disasters and Mayan predictions of doomsday for planet Earth, now with Contagion we have a new threat that's much more close to home that can hit anyone, anytime, anywhere. In fact it could be happening right now.

Mitch Emoff (Matt Damon; The Adjustment Bureau, True Grit) greets his wife, Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow; (Country Strong, Iron Man 2) after her business trip to Hong Kong. She comes home with the sniffles and a few days later, she dies. Distraught at his wife's sudden death, Mitch and his daughter set off to find answers, or as the epidemic escalates, a way to survive. At the W.H.O. (World Health Organisation) Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne; Predators, Armoured) is confronted with the epidemic and the best way to handle it, both medically and politically so he send one of his newest recruits. Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet; Revolutionary Road, The Reader) to handle the investigation.

Meanwhile an anarchistic blogger called Alan Krumweide (Jude Law; Repo Men, Sherlock Holmes) is causing more and more widespread panic due to his misguided and often inflammatory reporting on the global epidemic. All the while, a cure is being developed, but how many will it be given to? And how soon?

Steven Soderbergh has had a wide-ranging career, from such blockbusters as Men In Black and Ocean's Eleven to more critically acclaimed fare such as Erin Brockovich and Traffic. So with a subject such as the one in Contagion and with the biggest all-star cast seen in a movie for a very long time then a blockbuster is certainly what springs to mind. However the tone of Contagion is somewhat different than expected. There is no heightened drama, there are no risk taking, heroic feats by the main cast and really there is no sense of underlying threat at all. The people who live are living, and the people who die, well they just die and are pretty much forgotten about for the rest of the movie. Life goes on.

Arguably it could be said that Soderbergh has gotten the tone all wrong and that the movie is filled with facts and figures and none of the drama and action that audiences come to expect. However, on the other hand it could be argued that Contagion's almost documentary-like approach to its subject matter makes the movie all that more scary. We've lived through things like this happening in recent years. The ones that have been affected have been either very ill for a short period of time and either got better or, sadly, died and the ones that weren't affected just lived their lives as nothing was going on in the world.

The movie does go in depth about the statistics and the realities (albeit somewhat heightened) of what happens during an epidemic. It could also be argued that the recent numbers calculated that the world's population reached 7 billion could have been reached by adding up the population numbers mentioned in the movie. However those who really look at it deeply could be very scared (I remember myself during the screening suppressing a sneeze like my life depended on it) and hypochondriacs should probably steer well clear of this movie but for those who like to see an account of how the world would, to an extent, realistically deal with such a situation (and see a lot of movie stars) then Contagion is not to be sneezed at.