Contagion (2011)

Steven Soderbergh's latest thriller involves the deadliest of killers: germs. Everyone is at least a little, even if just subconsciously, afraid of germs and what they can do. We dread getting even the smallest bit sick and spend a lot of money every year to keep from doing so. Soderbergh tries to take this fear and enhance it ten times and sell it as a movie. He claims he wanted Contagion to be for elevator buttons what Jaws was for the ocean. I give him kudos for trying his darndest, but this just isn't the same. I think this movie fails partly because it's too realistic. It feels like we're watching an old Discovery Channel special about something that must have happened to our grandparents or something. Besides the technology, of course, which is used extensively to make sure we realize it is the present. In an extension of this, it fails because it spends the entire movie trying to prove its accuracy, leaving no room for the fear. A good thriller must be thrilling, but Contagion drags a bit.

This is the sort of movie that doesn't really need celebrities because all the roles are too small. Yet, there are a dozen famous faces on display, some in roles that don't last but one scene. This isn't the 50s. We don't gasp and applaud when Gwyneth Paltrow shows up just long enough to die. Only Matt Damon and Laurence Fishburne play anything resembling main characters. And, good grief, does Damon ever get on the nerves. I know he lost his wife and everything, but he has the same look of concentrated confusion on his face through the whole movie. And he repeats EVERYTHING he says. "What are you talking about? What happened to her? What happened to her?!" and "I'm trying to understand here. I'm trying to understand!" are the obvious gems. Fishburne's character is the one we're supposed to put up on a pedestal because he helped a kid and because he becomes the scapegoat for the whole epidemic. This is thanks to the most annoying and pointless character in the film, Jude Law as a popular blogger. I suppose we're supposed to feel bad for Kate Winslet as well, and even more so for Marion Cotillard, even though her character is discarded without so much as an explanation.

There are moments in this movie that are intense enough to briefly sell the premise. One particular scene where Winslet finds out she's talking on the phone to a man who has the disease proves that Soderbergh does know what he's doing at least a bit. He just tries too hard to cram the movie with people so everyone in the audience can relate to somebody, but these people just don't do anything interesting or help make the movie any more frightening. This simply isn't Traffic. No, this is a movie where a bat spits on a pig, a woman eats the pig, the woman gets an illness before running all around a casino touching everything she passes, and then half of America gets it. The end.

6/10