Contagion (2011)
Sep. 20th, 2011 09:46![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyContagion. 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.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth Studios; you can comment there using OpenID or a DW account.
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.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth Studios; you can comment there using OpenID or a DW account.
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Date: 2011-09-20 19:37 (UTC)people will die, but the CDC will save us
This strikes me as a rather radical opinion to offer at the current cultural moment, where right-wing anti-government attitudes are becoming mainstream. The idea that yes, actually, we do need the kind of research and coordination that the government provides to save lives....it's not one I would expect to see in a film.