Contagion (2011)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
As an epidemic of a lethal airborne virus - that kills within days - rapidly grows, the worldwide medical community races to find a cure and control the panic that spreads faster than the virus itself.
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In fact, Soderbergh has cited the Allen-produced The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974) as inspiratuons, though the Allen-directed The Swarm(1978) may be closer than anything else—only with a greater degree of governing intelligence and considerably more polish.
Think The Towering Inferno, as done by Anthony Trollope.
Back in the ‘70s when movies like The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure were huge, people gathered in droves to watch their favorite actors brave calamities of epic proportions, be it a raging fire, a ground-shattering earthquake or even a killer swarm of hyper-intelligent bees.
Now while such a large cast makes "Contagion" sound like "The Towering Inferno" for the hypochondriac set, it plays its cards remarkably close to the vest.
The cavalcade of noted actors and the "world in peril" angle would seem to make the film a natural heir to deeply stupid yet inexplicably enjoyable flicks like The Towering Inferno, Earthquake and in the '90s, when disco returned to the charts and disaster movies to the megaplex (cosmically linked events, one could argue), Dante's Peak or Outbreak.
In fact, Soderbergh has cited the Allen-produced The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974) as inspiratuons, though the Allen-directed The Swarm(1978) may be closer than anything else—only with a greater degree of governing intelligence and considerably more polish.
Or, in more recent terms, it’s like Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak (1995) minus the monkey and with more than two functioning brain cells.
Director Steven Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns eschew hysterical melodrama (e.g., 1995’s Outbreak) in favor of a matter-of-fact tracing of the disease from its first victim (Gwyneth Paltrow) through the far-flung efforts to cope with the spreading mortality.
Same goes for that symphony of coughing that invariably accompanies any public screening experience: Once an annoyance, the unwelcome noise takes on a threatening edge in this context -- a reminder of the scene in 1995's Ebola-inspired film "Outbreak," in which someone sneezes in a movie theater and the camera follows the swarm of germs around the darkened room.
It’s hard not to immediately hearken back to Wolfgang Petersen’s 1995 heart-pounder, Outbreak, the last major pandemic film with a stellar cast.
We expect to see the graphs where the color red envelops continents with each passing day and the eventual breakdown in human civility as lack of knowledge turns into desperation, but nothing about the film feels sensationalistic or headed towards some big action climax a la Dustin Hoffman running down the monkey and playing helicopter chicken in Outbreak.
The premise itself is sure to draw more than a cursory comparison to 1995's "Outbreak," but "Contagion" stands as the superior, less commercially reliant effort.
Children of Men, The Andromeda Strain, 28 Days Later, 12 Monkeys and Outbreak are a few that come to mind.
But it’s smarter than that, and a lot closer to medical thrillers like “The Andromeda Strain.”
While the movie never rises to the level of allegory, it's these zeitgeisty touches that make Contagion worthwhile in a genre that's already seen such serviceable predecessors as Outbreak and The Andromeda Strain .
"Contagion" has more in common with Michael Crichton's " The Andromeda Strain ": Set underground in hyper-sterile laboratory environs, that chilly movie's action was mostly of the cerebral kind, featuring a quartet of dispassionate experts glued to microscopes, computer screens and observation windows, looking to decode a deadly, alien virus.
I was eager to see what a guy who presents so many different looks and styles would bring to a modern-day version of The Andromeda Strain .
It’s not nearly as dull as The Andromeda Strain, but it’s missing the energy of something like Outbreak.
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Even though on the surface it shares the global scale of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Babel,” Steven Soderbergh ’s “Contagion” doesn’t have the same preoccupation with the interconnectedness of the world.
We get sections set in China, Japan and elsewhere, giving the film a bit of a "world movie" feel in the tradition of Babel and that sort of film—of course, then it forgets about Asia for long stretches.
Traffic employed a network narrative (think Babel , Magnolia , Crash ) to demonstrate the human cost of the drug war, but in Contagion the network forms the narrative itself.
When I heard this year’s Contagion described as being in the same vein as Traffic and Crash, I jumped at the opportunity to review it, mentally adding Babel to that list, though it served better with more distinction for each vignette and more sensitivity paid to the personal.
The script, by frequent Soderbergh collaborator Scott Z. Burns ( The Informant! ), is somewhat swollen with Babel -like symptoms of too many button-pushing Subplots of Human Interest.
Juggling multiple plotlines proved successful in Mr. Soderberg’s Traffic (and even more so in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s vastly superior Babel ).
In fact, Soderbergh has cited the Allen-produced The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974) as inspiratuons, though the Allen-directed The Swarm(1978) may be closer than anything else—only with a greater degree of governing intelligence and considerably more polish.
Allen didn't really invent the disaster movie; that honor probably goes to Airport (1970), with Dean Martin trying to land a Boeing 707 that's been crippled by a terrorist bombing.
With the sort of all-star cast you used to find in 1970s movies such as The Towering Inferno or Airport , Soderbergh also probes the global political systems in place to cope with such outbreaks, dredging up stats from Sars panics, Aids epidemics and even the Spanish influenza outbreak of 1918 which claimed up to 50 million lives.
Babel , but the fact remains that Babel exists; and what seemed fresh and exciting and dare I say revolutionary in 2000 does not seem that way nearly so much in 2012; nor does it help that Soderbergh himself made basically the exact same movie in 2011, with Contagion - down to the same editor, Steven Mirrione, and the same composer, Cliff Martinez, both of whom contribute an almost incalcuable amount to the tension and shape of both films - with "Disease Is An Important World Issue" subbing in for "Drugs Are An Important World Issue", and a little of the seriousness giving way to thriller mechanics.
Unlike Soderbergh’s other major multi-narrative film Traffic, this film often skimps on giving many members of its heavyweight cast suitably rich material to explore.
He's helmed boisterous crowd-pleasers like the "Ocean's 11" movies, Oscar-bait like "Traffic" and "Erin Brockovich" and quiet little indie films like "Solaris" and "The Girlfriend Experience."
Contagion shares some of its DNA with Soderbergh's prior global political thriller, Traffic.
Like the director's Traffic , the film explores all the connections, from the most obvious to the most subtle, that link the teeming mass of modern society, but where Traffic is almost Dickensian in its world-as-theater storytelling ambition, Contagion is as single-minded as its microscopic star: it wants to freak us out, showing how our life as globally-connected beings is both our greatest risk and our greatest hope for being able to survive whatever terrible and largely arbitrary things might happen to us (the explanation for MEV-1's origin is balanced right on the edge between "that is terrifyingly believable" and "that is ludicrous", and either way it's predicated on a series of entirely run-of-the-mill coincidences).
Contagion is a well-made, effective chiller directed by an authenticity-obsessed Steven Soderbergh (Traffic).
This is Soderbergh's 22nd feature in 22 years; his first was sex, lies, and videotape, followed by crowdpleasers like Erin Brockovich and the Ocean's Eleven (Twelve, Thirteen) capers and several defiantly indie efforts (Solaris, Bubble, Che, The Girlfriend Experience).
In contrast with the director's other celeb-filled ensemble, "Ocean's Eleven," where chemistry was everything, these stars seldom share the screen.
And for a while there, the film undeniably does feel like a carbon copy of Ocean's Eleven - complete with introductory sequences for each of the characters.
, whose 22 years in the business have yielded such fine works as “sex, lies and videotape,” “King of the Hill,” “Out of Sight,” “The Limey,” “Erin Brockovich,” “Traffic,” “Che,” “The Informant!” and the “Ocean’s Eleven” series, among many others.
Soderbergh is no stranger to large casts thanks to Traffic and the Ocean’s Eleven films and he deftly handles a whopper of one here: Matt Damon as a father whose family is struck by a deadly new form of the flu; Gwyneth Paltrow as his ailing wife; Kate Winslet as an “epidemic intelligence service investigator;” Laurence Fishburne as her boss at the Center for Disease Control; Marion Cotillard as a European investigator; Jude Law as a conspiracy blogger.
It's Soderbergh's masterful marriage between a fast-pace editing style and a slow-burn storytelling approach that makes Contagion my favorite film of his since Ocean's Eleven and proves that if Soderbergh is indeed retiring as a filmmaker soon, he has no intentions of letting his career go out with a whimper.
Some of the time he's quite serious as in "Che," "Traffic," "Erin Brockovich," and "Sex, Lies and Videotape"; sometimes he's playful as in the "Ocean's" series, "The Limey," and "The Informant"; and sometimes he's art-house mannered as in "Solaris," "Full Frontal," and "The Good German."
Director Steven Soderbergh's refusal to be pigeonholed continues here, as the director infuses the proceedings with a vibrant, almost peppy sense of style that's essentially the antithesis of his work on The Limey.
, whose 22 years in the business have yielded such fine works as “sex, lies and videotape,” “King of the Hill,” “Out of Sight,” “The Limey,” “Erin Brockovich,” “Traffic,” “Che,” “The Informant!” and the “Ocean’s Eleven” series, among many others.
Out of Sight and Traffic contained a wide variety of film stocks and filters, while The Limey and The Underneath played around with time.
, whose 22 years in the business have yielded such fine works as “sex, lies and videotape,” “King of the Hill,” “Out of Sight,” “The Limey,” “Erin Brockovich,” “Traffic,” “Che,” “The Informant!” and the “Ocean’s Eleven” series, among many others.
As Out of Sight flipped the romantic comedy and Erin Brockovich flipped the do-gooder movie and Ocean’s XX riffed on the rat pack flick, Contagion drives Steven right into Irwin Allen territory, where he uses all of his craft and collaborators to make a film that never feels like the schlockfest it could well have been.
During the past two decades, the director has swung wildly from populist fare (the "Ocean's" series) to award-winners ("Traffic," "Erin Brockovich") to obscure indie pictures ("Bubble," "The Girlfriend Experience") to everywhere in between and back again.
So movies such as “The Girlfriend Experience,” “Che” and “Bubble” were definitely for him, while others such as his planned “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” picture are for them.
Over the past ten years, the director has experimented at virtually every point on the cinematic spectrum, from inconspicuous indie ( The Girlfriend Experience , Bubble ) to half-hearted mass-market ( Oceans Eleven sequels), and it's nice to see him again undertaking a project of such scope and ambition.
Even small turns from such veteran character actors as Elliott Gould (2007's " Ocean's Thirteen "), John Hawkes (2010's " Winter's Bone "), and Enrico Colantoni (2002's " Full Frontal ") make an impact, all of them aiding to the full picture in the same way the ensemble of, for example, 2005's " Syriana " did.If there is an emotional throughline to the narrative tapestry, it is the internal path taken by Matt Damon's (2011's " The Adjustment Bureau ") Mitch Emhoff, keeping his strength and morale up for his daughter while putting on holding the unbearable grief of losing his wife and son.
From "Traffic" (2000) to "Ocean's Thirteen" (2007), Soderbergh has been a magnet for stellar Hollywood talent.
As the killer flu she carries spreads exponentially, and oh-so quickly, in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Chicago, London, and beyond, doctors and scientists -- including, in refreshingly no-nonsense performances, Laurence Fishburne ( Predators ), Kate Winslet ( The Reader ), Jennifer Ehle ( The Ides of March ), Elliot Gould ( Ocean’s Thirteen ), and Marion Cotillard ( Inception ) -- rush to figure out what the virus is, where it came from, and whether it can be cured, or at least vaccinated against.
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Inglourious Basterds and 1985's Demons may have used their cinema setting to great effect but during Contagion you can sense the anxiety that comes from human proximity, let alone the angst accompanying an audience member’s cough.
George A. Romero's depiction of a similar, albeit fantastical, situations in his zombie films (particularly in Night of the Living Dead and the 1978 Dawn of the Dead) strike me as far more accurate, emotionally invested, and altogether important meditations on the human condition when faced with its rapidly approaching end.