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Contagion (2011)
Contagion. Dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2011.
This was a pretty good movie. And it was both less scary and less gruesome than I was expecting, which was a personal plus. As my bio-major friend with whom I saw it said, in terms of disease prevention and pandemic response, "This movie didn't really tell us anything we didn't already know."
Let me give you a plot summary: an entirely new virus emerges somewhere in the world (but WHERE?) and begins doing what viruses do best, i.e. infecting its hosts, namely human beings. The drama comes from the search for a cure (WHEN will it happen?) as we watch characters around the world, but mostly Stateside, to whom we've been introduced with varying degrees of depth, deal with the pandemic and its social consequences (WHO will die?). Also featuring Sanjay Gupta, as himself.
As other people have said, the movie skips most of the science in the middle of the "new disease emerges, amplifies, is investigated and contained" paradigm to focus on the initial infection, amplification, and containment phases, rather than the scut work of science in the middle. And with that major caveat, within the limits of a Hollywood movie, its portrayal of that process and its speculation on the degree of social dislocation that it would entail seemed fairly reasonable to me, who has an interested layman's grasp of these matters, having gone through an epidemiology & pandemics phase a few years ago. The eventual isolation of the index case and the location of its contraction are also consistent with the best current scientific knowledge, and I enjoyed the mild cinematic ingenuity with which it was eventually revealed. In fact, as a Steven Soderbergh movie, I was somewhat surprised by its overall lack of technical innovation.
I am sad that Chin Han seems to be unable to get any roles but that of "dodgy dude in Hong Kong" in Hollywood films; I was also surprised at how much of a lie-spewing asshole Jude Law's character turned out to be, which I suspect to some extent is a symptom of old media (movies) hating on new media (blogs). It's actually mildly interesting that none of the central physician characters (Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, and Jennifer Ehle) were white men, but of course, most of them were white women. For a supposedly global movie, the cast was disproportionately white, and a white guy--Matt Damon--and his daughter do provide the movie's main emotional focus in most respects, though I thought its portrayal of him (Patient Zero was his wife) was reasonably nuanced and sympathetic. The movie's central message (people will die, but the CDC will save us) was in the end fairly optimistic, which as a moviegoer I appreciated, even if watching this movie through the lens of having recently read Mira Grant's Newsflesh books did give me an odd double vision at times.
This was a pretty good movie. And it was both less scary and less gruesome than I was expecting, which was a personal plus. As my bio-major friend with whom I saw it said, in terms of disease prevention and pandemic response, "This movie didn't really tell us anything we didn't already know."
Let me give you a plot summary: an entirely new virus emerges somewhere in the world (but WHERE?) and begins doing what viruses do best, i.e. infecting its hosts, namely human beings. The drama comes from the search for a cure (WHEN will it happen?) as we watch characters around the world, but mostly Stateside, to whom we've been introduced with varying degrees of depth, deal with the pandemic and its social consequences (WHO will die?). Also featuring Sanjay Gupta, as himself.
As other people have said, the movie skips most of the science in the middle of the "new disease emerges, amplifies, is investigated and contained" paradigm to focus on the initial infection, amplification, and containment phases, rather than the scut work of science in the middle. And with that major caveat, within the limits of a Hollywood movie, its portrayal of that process and its speculation on the degree of social dislocation that it would entail seemed fairly reasonable to me, who has an interested layman's grasp of these matters, having gone through an epidemiology & pandemics phase a few years ago. The eventual isolation of the index case and the location of its contraction are also consistent with the best current scientific knowledge, and I enjoyed the mild cinematic ingenuity with which it was eventually revealed. In fact, as a Steven Soderbergh movie, I was somewhat surprised by its overall lack of technical innovation.
I am sad that Chin Han seems to be unable to get any roles but that of "dodgy dude in Hong Kong" in Hollywood films; I was also surprised at how much of a lie-spewing asshole Jude Law's character turned out to be, which I suspect to some extent is a symptom of old media (movies) hating on new media (blogs). It's actually mildly interesting that none of the central physician characters (Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, and Jennifer Ehle) were white men, but of course, most of them were white women. For a supposedly global movie, the cast was disproportionately white, and a white guy--Matt Damon--and his daughter do provide the movie's main emotional focus in most respects, though I thought its portrayal of him (Patient Zero was his wife) was reasonably nuanced and sympathetic. The movie's central message (people will die, but the CDC will save us) was in the end fairly optimistic, which as a moviegoer I appreciated, even if watching this movie through the lens of having recently read Mira Grant's Newsflesh books did give me an odd double vision at times.
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1) I think you're right that Matt Damon is the default emotional focus (the movie more or less begins and ends with him), but I found the time spent on each character to be balanced enough that who will end up being the emotional focus for each individual who watches is probably idiosyncratic. For me it was Jennifer Ehle (geek woman, duh) and to a lesser extent Laurence Fishburne.
2) What I think was interesting about this movie is that it didn't posit a lethal pandemic as transformational. The more I think about that, the more I think it's interesting. They did portray the breakdown of society, but they suggested that society is resilient to that in the long term. Trash piles up, riots break out - but the labs keep researching, the government is still there in the end to portion out the vaccine, and society accepts this imposition of order. The use of force becomes dodgy for a bit, but only at the margins, and in the end it's reconsolidated by the government, and the government has not used the excuse to go crazy. The movie postulates that we can face a fundamental social upheaval and come out of it still sane. I don't know if that's true, but I think it's plausible. And sweet.
3) In general, I think this is a subset of my general feelings about this movie, which is that it seemed to be coming from a basically sympathetic, humane view of humanity. Humans in this movie can be and are decent people even though they also make mistakes. (And not just in that annoying, Hollywood-redemptive "I WAS bad, but now I have seen the light and I am GOOD!" way.) I think it's note-worthy that the only really bad character in the movie, Jude Law's reporter, is also the guy that's out there trying to pillory people for showing occasional human weaknesses. Maybe being able to forgive yourself and others when you slip from the ideal is a prerequisite for staying sane and staying good in hard times? I feel like Jude Law's character is living in a post-apocalyptic movie; the rest of them are living in a medical drama.
3) The funny thing about Chin Han is that to me his face looks so trustworthy!