Review: Contagion. Catch It This Weekend

Or At Least Use Hand Sanitizer, k?

Firstly, forget the over-amped ads that have titles like “Pulse Pounding” pushing out of the TV screen and into your lap. “Contagion” is smarter than that, even if it isn’t quite as exciting as the commercials will lead you to believe. You see, they underestimate you, those movie-selling folks—they think you won’t go see something that is described as “Interesting” or, say “Kinda Realisitic Without Being Too Over The Top!!!!” Nope, you’ll only see something that “Grips You By The Gonads” or “Shakes You By The Sack!” or the hoary, ever ready  “Pulse Pounding.”

So, turn down the volume and your expectations of how these kinds of movies usually go, and consider this for a moment: every Zombie flick in history, for better or worse, is about a “virus” skipping from one person to another, and how the rules of society start to break down (looting, cheating to get preferential treatment, violence, etc.) once the population panics. In that sense, director Steven Soderbergh’s ensemble cast and rather chill take on the subject matter might be the classiest and quietest Zombie flick in all of movie history.

But whereas most movies would concentrate on the ‘affected,’ “Contagion”  shows us what the professionals are going through, somewhat behind the scenes. There’s Laurence Fishburne at the CDC in Atlanta, the doctors and epidemiologists who are in a race against the clock to create a vaccine, the people who will have to deal with the public, etc.

The movie does start with a victim—call Gwyneth Paltrow victim #1. She’s been in Hong Kong for a trip, while her hubby, Matt Damon has awaited her arrival home in Minnesota. I spoil nothing by saying that Paltrow is a goner in the first minutes of the movie, leaving Damon to figure out what she got, and how he can keep his other loved ones, and himself, from getting the same thing.  The film skips around from one group of characters to another, just as Soderbergh did in his Oscar winning, “Traffic,” and the down side to that constant shifting is that we never feel truly invested in the fates of the characters, save Damon’s family dilemma. It’s also, frankly, a bit slow in spots—so you wouldn’t describe the experience of seeing this movie as “emotional” and it would be hyperbolic to pull out “pulse pounding.” But what you could honestly say, and it would be a total compliment, is that the movie is interesting—you want to know what happens next, and you experience some “a-ha” moments (did you know that you touch your face a couple thousand times a day?? Me neither!) and you follow the flick as a procedural, searching for clues to the mystery of where the virus came from and whose “fault” it was. Isn’t that enough? It was for me.

You know that guy who comes to work sick and makes everyone else sick? This film is interested in who made that guy sick. I liked the film, I’d give it a solid “B” or three stars. But the only thing that got pounded was the pump on my hand sanitizer bottle—that thing’s kaput. No pulse.