By Warren Day
Contagion” may be the scariest movie you’ll ever see. Not in a vampire or werewolf kind of way, because deep down you know you’re never going to meet one of those in real life (especially one that looks like Robert Pattinson or Taylor Lautner).
What makes director Steven Soderbergh’s latest film so frightening is that it deals with something that not only could happen, but also has actually occurred in the past and is widely predicted to happen again – a new virus that is resistant to all treatment, resulting in millions of deaths. You may jump out of your seat at more traditional scary movies, but this one will probably give you more nightmares.
Soderbergh has a talent for gathering a stellar cast, as he did in “Ocean’s 11,” “12” and “13,” and here he does it again. In “Contagion,” the stars include Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Laurence Fishburne. The casting is one of the strengths of the film (no star can play everyman better than Damon, and Fishburne has the gravitas to play the head of a large government agency). Since you have some feelings already for these well-known stars the director doesn’t have to spend much time making you care about what happens to them. But the casting is also one of its weaknesses since he wasn’t able to find A-listers for all the major parts, it can be somewhat jarring going from scenes with Damon and Paltrow to a couple of unrecognizable actors with equally sized parts.
From the beginning, Soderbergh gives the movie a documentary feel that makes the events seem quite feasible, and since this virus is airborne and highly contagious, he instills a sense of doom in ordinary occurrences – someone coughing on a crowded bus, blowing on dice for luck, two hands reaching into the same peanut bowl. After seeing “Contagion,” you may find yourself scared to touch another doorknob.
If you think this film exaggerates what can happen in a pandemic, remember that in 1348, the Black Plague hitchhiked a ride to China with traders (the virus in this film also starts in China), and in just two years 30 to 60% of the population of Europe was wiped out. Less than a hundred years ago, 1918 – 1919, Spanish Flu killed as many as 100 million worldwide, including 675,000 in the USA (my great grandfather was one of those). As this film demonstrates, with people and goods constantly flowing across continents today, what used to take two years to develop can now take place in a single month.
The trouble with this kind of story is where do you go
with it? Besides anxiety, what is the audience suppose to feel or think? We’ve always had sound-thealarm movies, but usually they deal with some peril over which we can, if willing, take steps to reduce the threat – proliferation of nuclear weapons, ruining our environment. What can you do against an unknown virus that could already be entering someone’s blood stream, someone who’s about to catch a plane to an airport near where you live?
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