Contagion (2011)

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh

A woman develops flu-like symptoms on her way back from the far east.  Within days, she is dead. Soon, people are dropping like flies, as the highly contagious disease moves from person to drinking glass to person to hand-rail and so on.  The Centres for Disease Control weigh in, as does the WHO and assorted independent medics (Elliott Gould as a rather sketched-in maverick doctor, flying the flag for the “rules are for other people” school of infectious disease control).  So do the cranks, represented by internet journo Alan “Don’t Believe Anything They Tell You” Krumwiede (Jude Law).  Within weeks we are dealing with mega-deaths, and the army is on the streets.  Can a vaccine be developed?

I pose this question to introduce some tension, but in fact we know the vaccine is coming, because this movie is so realistic (at least by comparison with most Hollywood science flicks).  The catastrophe unfolds in credible timeframes, and does not spare the stars (the  woman who brings the disease to North America and dies in the first few minutes of the movie is none other than Gwyneth Paltrow – surely her quickest exit from a movie since she achieved stardom, though she gets to appear again towards the end in some CCTV footage as the scientists attempt to trace how the virus began its global progress).  But stars abound in this film (at times it reminded me of The Longest Day in that respect), and they feel a little cramped. In addition to those already mentioned, we have Matt Damon, Jennifer Ehle, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet and Laurence Fishburne. Bizarrely, what is missing from the movie is a real sense of peril, and that stems both from its documentary-level realism and also from the fact that we don’t get involved enough with anyone to feel really horrified by the prospect of their death.

If you are in the mood for a sober movie about how diseases can move around a highly connected world, this is for you. If you want excitement, you may need to look elsewhere.