"Contagion" Spreads like the Flu with Minimal Effects

Let me start off by saying that I've had issues with Contagion before it even hit theaters.  A few months ago, way before any preview had been released for the movie, I had a dream about a disease wiping out the population.  It played out like a film in my head, and the second I woke up, I wrote down what happened because I figured it could be a good idea for a screenplay (hopefully one day I'll have time to write my own movie and not just a few paragraphs every now and then reviewing one written by someone famous...we'll see).  So yeah, I was pretty upset when I finally did see the trailer.  I had to check it out though to see just how similar it was compared to my tentative script.

The movie starts off with sequences of people simply touching things.  And since it's clear that this is a movie about germs and a fatal disease that spreads across the globe, I was immediately grossed out.  However, the cringing just about ends there apart from one scene involving Gwyneth Paltrow's autopsy.  If you've seen the trailer, you know that's not a spoiler.  She's the first one dead.  The studio certainly could've saved some money casting a nobody for her role, but Contagion is all about the ensemble cast.

So thanks to whatever Gwyneth did (you'll find out), the world is suffering from bird flu times 1,000.  This leaves her husband, Matt Damon, who is immune to the disease, alone with his daughter from a previous marriage.  He deals with the loss of his wife, and the anxiety of whether or not his daughter is immune, thus turning him into an overprotective father, but reasonably so.

Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet do the best they can to figure out how exactly this disease originated, and what elements make it up so they can come up with a cure.  Bryan Cranston is thrown into the mix and aids in the CDC's efforts.  Marion Cotillard works with the World Health Organization and is kidnapped in Hong Kong and held there until her captors receive the vaccine.  Jude Law is a blogger who gets rich and famous for his conspiracy stating that the government started this disease with the pharmaceutical companies for a profit.  I think that covers most of the ensemble cast.  It was kind of hard to keep up.

Now Contagion is actually a pretty good film, but there's too much, yet too little going on for it to be great.  With regards to the story, most of the movie is like an actual newscast or even a documentary making the whole thing very believable.  However, this involves simply showing people doing research while playing dark and ominous music.  There's not enough action or enough scenes depicting what is happening to everyone.  But I guess a bunch of seizures on screen would get old.  That's where there is too little.  The number of story lines and characters bring too much in a sense, which then results in minimal character development.  Don't get me wrong, the acting is great.  It truly felt like watching real people react to an epidemic, but there was so much I wanted to see happen for each character, particularly Cotillard who connects with the children she is surrounded by while held captive.  We learn that and see that develop in about 10 seconds.  At the end, however, we see Matt Damon crying over his wife's death, but seeing hope in his daughter who is going to prom that night.  They tried to make us feel really sorry for him, but it's not like he was the only person we followed throughout.

The final scene shows how the disease started.  It's actually a very cool sequence, but we were already told what happened, so this was literally just seeing it.  I'm really going back and forth with how I feel about Contagion.  The movie is very well directed by Steven Soderbergh and the performances are great, but it just wasn't as thrilling as I had hoped.  I did like it as an example of how crazy our society can get when given tragic news that will affect everyone's lives.  This is where the tagline "Nothing spreads like fear" comes in.  It was also cool as a metaphor for how quickly information can spread on the internet and how something like what Jude Law's character says, which is false, can result in an insane amount of people following one random person with a blog (should be me).  It's really disgusting to see people view him as a "prophet" only his posters say "profit" because of what he thinks the government is doing.  Think Glenn Beck, but not as bad.
Anyway, I washed my hands immediately after the movie, but then when I got on the subway to go home, I held the rail without hesitation.  I think that about sums up my uncertain reactions to Contagion.  Maybe if I ever get to writing a screenplay based on my dream, the audience will walk away satisfied and not on the fence.