Nerd Movie Reviews

Contagion movie review

Ever feel like you don’t have enough germophobia in your life?  Contagion has the cure.

So tonight it was Contagion, a movie about a plague that kills millions and causes Purell sales to skyrocket.  Overall a decent flick, if a little dry and, ironically, low impact.  What do I mean?  Let’s find out.

The movie starts off with Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) coming home from a wild trip to Hong Kong filled with drinking, casino gambling, and adultery.  She comes home not feeling well and falls over to shuffle off this mortal coil, followed shortly by her young son.  Her cuckold husband, Mitch (Matt Damon) is somehow immune.  Meanwhile, the camera runs around the world showing major metropolitan cities where people traveling from China are infecting their local communities.  We cut to several CDC lab scenes and officials, including Lawrence Fishburne as Dr. Cheever, the head.  Plague chaos and medical research ensues.  A local blogger manages to disrupt things by claiming a homeopathic remedy is the cure and runs around San Francisco in a homemade bubble suit (never underestimate the power of a well crafted blog.  Of course, for this blog underestimate all you want.  Also, did they really have to make the crazy conspiracy nut reside in San Francisco?  Weren’t their other stereotypes they could exploit?).

This movie was well written and directed.  The most interesting part for me was the progressive degeneration and break down of society they showed, although I think a few steps ended up on the cutting room floor as at one point the chaos went from fairly concerning to chaos on a massive scale in one scene change.  The science seemed pretty solid as well, with nothing obviously stupid being done.  The movie did manage to illustrate how the US has a really hard time moving quickly when dealing with drugs and vaccines that have to get out to the population in a timely manner, and there were undertones of pharmaceutical companies intending to exploit the health needs for profit, something I firmly believe they would do without hesitation.

Why, then, do I say kind of low impact?  The fact is, after the two initial deaths, for the most part none of the main characters died or were connected to people who died, in spite of any number of secondary characters introduced seemingly to provide fodder to make the movie more poignant.  There were a couple of mass grave scenes, but nothing that really looked like more than a bunch of carpet remnants being buried.  One doctor died, but the guy who was supposed to care didn’t even mention her again.  Basically the deaths took on a number aspect with little to no real emotional impact.  It started to feel like racking up kills in a video game.  The movie tended to be pretty dry anyway, with no violence to speak of or any kind of real conflict between characters.

Of course, I spent a lot of the movie hoping the corpses would get up and start trying to eat the flesh of the living, so maybe I’m a little skewed here.  I guess not all deadly diseases can be as cool as the T Virus (image courtesy of the video game t shirt category).

The stars.  Very well and intelligently written.  Two stars.  Nobody did anything stupid that made me want to scream.  One star.  Acted very well across the board.  One star.  Marion Cotillard (the hot French girl from Inception), who is one of my favorite actresses and hopefully my future wife, spent the movie looking pretty good.  One star.  The progression of anarchy and the CDC and government responses to the epidemic felt very real and well thought out.  One star.  Good science.  One star.  The research episodes appealed in the same way CSI seems cool.  One star.  Overall a good movie.  One star.  Total: nine stars.

The black holes.  The whole “death lacking impact” thing I just mentioned.  One black hole.  The CDC seemed to spend a lot of time trying to figure out where the disease came from rather than working on a cure, and as part of that pursuit spent a lot of time looking at security footage that looked exactly like it had been shot by the same film crew that did the normal scenes.  Most movies at least try to make security footage look grainy and black and white, without sound and/or full effects.  One black hole.  They laughingly list the population of San Francisco as 3.6 million people.  Most people don’t know this, but it is actually a fairly small city, with a population at last census of 808,976 people.  I guess they were trying to increase the effect of an outbreak in SF.  They can’t even claim to be using the population of the entire Bay Area, as that exceeds 7.6 million.  They were doing this thing where they listed the population of each area and probably felt something that low would feel less impactful, but it took me literally 10 seconds to look up and that kind of lazy writing always bugs me.  One black hole.  Total: three black holes.

There were a couple in the irksome category.  First off, I can’t decide if this movie was too gory or not gory enough.  We get treated to a semi-graphic autopsy of Gwyneth Paltrow (would you like some surrealism with your coffee?) but other than people foaming at the mouth don’t see much.  I think the lack of gore, while appealing to my desire to see movies not rely on that banal Hollywood crutch, kind of aided the lack of emotional content.  A couple scenes of people coughing up their lungs while dying a painful, prolonged death might have brought it home more.  I also found a few of the many sub plots kind of unnecessary.  Not enough to hurt the plot.  Just kind of dead time on the screen.

So a final tally of six stars, a very respectable score.  I think if you are into medical dramas or CSI style crime investigation you will really enjoy it.  However, there is nothing visually that really cries out for a big screen so if you want to save a few bucks wait for NetFlix.  Not at all a good date film, as your date will not want to have anything to do with human contact after this film, and odds are neither will you.  To be honest I went to the bathroom afterwards and really washed my hands.  I think I will now give my bathroom and kitchen the scrubbing of a lifetime.  OCD, here I come!

Follow me on Twitter, where you can stay in touch with no chance of any kind of disease transmission @Nerdkungfu.  Warrior next, I think, if I can muster up the testosterone.  Thanks for reading this.

Tags: Contagion movie review, video game t shirts