Thursday, October 20, 2011

Contagion


In Jaws, we learnt not to go to the beach; in (insert random horror flick here), we learnt not to go back to you home town on the anniversary that all your friends/family were murdered; here is another film that will teach you something - be afraid of EVERYTHING*  (*disclaimer - may not include actually everything).

A mild spoiler warning, it's hard not to mention things that happened so early on in the film so go get yourself a cup of tea and do that laundry you've been putting off if you don't want to be spoiled : )

Contagion is brought to us by the wondrous team that bought us The Informant!, director Steve Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns and has a cast big enough to give Harry Potter a run for its money.

It's Day 2. Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow - Iron Man 2) looks like crap. She's just been to Kowloon, Hong Kong on business and she's caught a bug. Not just a bug, THE bug. She doesn't last long. Her husband Mitch (Matt Damon - Hereafter) not only grieves over her death, but also their young son's who also succumbs to the virus.

Before you can say 'Outbreak sucks', the virus spreads. Hot on it's tail are Dr Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne - Predators) from the Centre for Disease Control and Dr Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard - Inception) from the World Health Organisation. They, along with a team of top-notch scientists, are trying to find out how Beth caught the virus so they can come up with a vaccine. Single digits turn to double digits and soon, hundreds of thousands are dead/really frikken sick. Cheever sends Dr Mears (Kate Winslet - Revolutionary Road) to Minneapolis to investigate Beth and to convert sports stadiums into treatment centres.

Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law - Sherlock Holmes) has a blog called Truth Serum. He reckons he knows of a cure, Forsythia. Millions of people read his blog; pharmacies are broken in to and ransacked for this alleged cure. The panic spreads faster than the virus. When a vaccine is created, Alan spreads vicious rumours about it. Naturally, his readership goes up. Motives must be questioned.

This was a darn good film. There was so much going on, what with such a huge cast, but somehow Burns and Soderbergh found the Goldie Locks zone between too much info and not enough. Each character was so well formed, you can't not connect with them and trying to empathise with what they are going through and ask yourself, How would I react? What would I do if that happened? Maybe it's not so much an if, but a when.

I loved the camera angles when Alan was being interviewed on TV; we see him from the left side, then from the right side, back and forth like a shoulder angel/devil that didn't know which side it was on. I barely noticed the soundtrack, which is a good thing I guess; it didn't take my attention away.

If this doesn't get nominated for a whole bunch of Oscars I will be very, very, very shocked.  While you're here, have a squiz at the CDC's Zombie advice blog - it's from the experts and you might just need it one day!

Things I learnt: if you run out of body bags, call Canada; "blogging isn't writing, it's just graffiti with punctuation"; don't be a douche, vaccinate your kids for frak's sake. Now go and stock up on hand sanitizer.

W.O.W
Nine out of ten.

2 comments:

  1. Awesome, cant wait to see this. Looks like a real thriller. Almost a more big budget Americanized version of 28 Days.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I would have given it a 10 if it had zombies :D

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