Little tip for all you germaphobes out there: go equipped with gloves, mouth masks and hand sanitisers because Contagion will scare the living sh*t out of you.
I usually keep a safe distance from excessively star-studded casts (in this case, it’s Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, Bryan Cranston…). Rarely are they synonymous of quality. In Contagion, however, it works: you focus on all characters equally and let the leading role be played by the invisible, highly contagious, deadly, nameless virus.
It all starts with Paltrow’s character Beth Emhoff who, after a business trip to Hong Kong, seems to have little more than jet-lag and a cold but inexplicably has a seizure, dies within hours as does her son, soon after her. Around the same time a man on a bus in Hong Kong dies with exactly the same symptoms as does another man in China, and yet another in Chicago, and so on and so forth The pandemic spreads with harrowing speed whilst labs struggle try to find a cure and society shatters, with looting and rioting breaking out into war-like grim scenarios, frightfully similar to the unnerving images of New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina. The count-down narration and the very recognizable Soderbergh-style fast-paced editing further increase the tension and idea of haste, which are major features in the film.
The chilling part is that this plot isn’t all that unrealistic. We’ve seen the H1N1 scare, the rate at which HIV takes lives in Africa, how quickly our daily streams of connection and every personal and professional relationship which make our life possible, ironically can become the vehicle the destroys it.
Being a germaphobe myself (you’d be surprised with the techniques I’ve come up with so I won’t (directly) touch anything unsanitised or untrustworthy): I can only reassure myself with Jason Solomons wise words: it’s a disaster movie, not a documentary.
Still, bleach rules!
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