By Nick Rosa
Contagion begins with a black screen, a harsh cough, then a transmission sequence of a bartender taking money and punching the amount into the cash register with a close up of his hands. The message is clear from the start: the spread of a virus can be fast and easily passed to anyone.
The film is a realistic look into the spread of an unknown airborne virus that causes a worldwide epidemic that spreads relentlessly through the human race in a short period of time.
Director Steven Soderbergh does an excellent job, not just in showing the thrilling aspect of the disease’s transmission, but the fear it gave to our society. Like it said on the movie poster, “Nothing spreads like fear.”
In Contagion, a mysterious virus refuses to be isolated, rejecting cures as it continually figures out the human body faster than humans can understand it. The virus is running rampant around the world and scientists are struggling to find a cure.
Soderbergh does an excellent job of telling the story through the lives of several key characters, and of course the interaction with many others, with a ‘connect-the-dot’ story line.
Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet and Marion Cotillard head the cast in brilliant performances, especially from Damon and Law. Damon plays an immune husband who is married to Paltrow, who eventually dies as one of the first victims of the virus.
Law, who plays a popular blogger on conspiracy theories, exhibited tremendous acting, but his background in the film seemed to be unfocused and confusing at some plot points. It’s hard to follow his character and whether he is trying to add more fear to society through his website and what he truly believes, or if he’s trying to cause his own form of mayhem.
Fishburne is a doctor from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Winslet is from the Epidemic Intelligence Service and Cotillard is an investigator from the World Health Organization (WHO). These three characters work around the clock to discover where the virus originated from, who contracted it first and rush against time to find a vaccine.
The film is broken down in daily increments starting on day two, and moving through all phases of the disease up to day 140 as the virus slowly courses through the human population.
The shot and scene sequences Soderbergh uses really gives Contagion a great plot flow that makes audience members want to find the origin of the deadly virus all the way to the climax. Along with an amazing score, which was my favorite attribute of the film, moviegoers are kept on the edge of their seats the entire time. Some scenes just use music to capture the suspense within each shot.
Visuals were also well done to capture the realness of the situations the characters find themselves in. Another neat aspect that Soderbergh gives us is the virus’s point of view, in which we see close-ups of glasses, counter tops, door handles and subway poles to show just how vulnerable to infection we really are.
The way Soderbergh visualizes the spreading epidemic and ensuing fear shadows what people might do in the most frightening of times. Within the film you see trust between one another vanish and desperation within society present itself. Not knowing what is coming might just be the biggest fear of them all.
At the end of the film you get an explanation of the origin of the virus and how short the separation is between origin, contact and transmission. Whether or not Soderbergh’s version of events would actually happen in this day and age remains to be seen. Still, a virus could travel to multiple continents in a day’s time and that is what the director captured so well with the film.
This is a film that truly makes you think about how there’s really nothing we can do. Movies like this are supposed to grab your attention and get you thinking. Contagion does that and more. It is a thrilling film that will show you how vulnerable we all really are in the face of an unstoppable infectious virus.
