Imagine this. You're sitting on a train or bus and across from you is an ad reminding you to get vaccinated for the upcoming flu season. Now the first thought in your mind is to simply ignore the ad because you rarely get sick. Of course! That's the mind set of most people, then again maybe only some. Okay, it's just me. The guy next to you sneezes several times into his hand and you ignore that. A few seats away another person starts coughing without covering his mouth. Your brain visualizes thousands of germs flying out into the air. Now you begin to think and assess your situation: coughing, multiple people, small contain enclosure and you're sitting in the middle of it.
Little uninfected, healthy you!
Then you remember that not too long ago there appeared a little virus known as swine flu, H1N1 and you take back the idea of being a hard ass about getting vaccinated. Why? You were placed in a situation where you felt uncomfortable about being in the middle of flying germs coming out of open mouths. Everything suddenly looks and feels as though covered or crawling with germs and other microscopic particles of infectious filth. A hypochondriacs worst nightmare!
Here lies the premise of the movie Contagion. I love movies about infectious diseases, plagues or whatever that threatens the safety and existence of human kind. The two films the immediately come to mind are Outbreak and Virus, the one with Chuck Connors and Glenn Ford. I like these films because they show drama based on how people fight and struggle to survive against overwhelming odds. Of course, I also enjoy zombie movies too!
This is what I expected going into Contagion. The trailers showed what appeared to be a great plot and story centered on a global scale epidemic. Mind you, it's been a while since a film such as this as come around, and I honestly believe that the only reason it came out now is to serve as a reminder to prepare for the upcoming winter flu season. More on this later, but...
The movie starts by showing us various characters showing signs of mysterious, unidentified infection with the usual symptoms: coughing, soar throats, dizziness and getting hit by trucks. As this is happening, the audience is shown what and who these characters were interacting with setting up the plot of how the virus will spread to infect larger populations. One of these characters is Gwyneth Paltrow who returns home to her (2nd) husband, played by Matt Damon, from a trip abroad to Hong Kong. She quickly deteriorates due to the illness and in the process gets her son infected. The two subsequently die very early in the film.
Damon is left destroyed by the loss but is determined to keep his daughter, from a previous marriage, alive and safe once he finds out that he is immune to the virus. The movie spends the next hour showing us how the infection spreads and the CDC tries to combat the growing threat. Lawrence Fishburne plays the CDC's main talking head trying to find the origin of the virus while Kate Winslet plays a field doctor (?) organizing response teams to handle the outbreak and victims. Jude Law plays a journalist/blogger with selfish intentions and less then credible sources to inform the public about what is really happening.
Yeah, all the major players are introduced...
I'm not going to dive to deep into the story of this movie because there honestly isn't one, or a very loose one to follow. The movie is told from the perspective of at least six (6) characters! All of these characters are never developed or followed to closely by any extent. At least 2-3 of these characters are introduced from the beginning and are either killed by the virus or disappear entirely for a good portion of the film. They return later, but we are left wondering what the heck happened to them! Thorough out the film other characters appear for brief scenes and never return. I mean, what the heck is this movie trying to do, make me lose all interest in being able to follow a single character?
The movie switches POV's so many times that it is difficult to settle on the story or narrative plot of any one character. Each has their own agendas and they spend the entire movie trying to establish a point or reach a goal whether it is personal gain, protection, the cure, it doesn't matter because the movie suffers from ADHD. It is almost incapable of sustaining a single cohesive story because it tries to glue together six distinct stories on a very loose premise. It handles this task very poorly and I'm left feeling like I needed another two hours of explanation to piece this mess together in a comprehensive fashion. The two hour duration already feels too long, I might add. Instead of six POVs, I honestly think there should have been only three. It just seemed to much to follow with six, and like a said before, each suffered from lack of appropriate development.
Each time a character engaged me with a necessary conflict it changed to another. A buzz kill in my book.
What the movie did did show very well was the real public reaction to epidemics. I appreciated the fact that it showed how paranoia and fear can further put society at risk. We all know how pharmaceutical companies make decisions only for profits and how the government acts to deal with possible public health threats. The movie did a great job in portraying all those sides. Still, I felt as though the real story, Damon's character, was overshadowed by the mistake of too many perspectives. Now that I think about it, the film did serve one purpose and that was to create awareness of public health safety, government and CDC bureaucracy, selfish media and panic. It was not too long ago that swine flu scared the public into a state of panic. Speaking of N1H1, that's the epidemic's identity that the movie hides until the very last scene before the credits. Geez, there's a shocker! The whole movie is a documentary of the N1H1 scare of last year, only blown out of proportion to shown a possible worst case scenario.
All in all, Contagion had a good premise and some/most times I did enjoy it, but the constant POV change made it hard to get a handle on a single character's story of struggle and survival.
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