Contagion

I quite like the majority of Steven Soderburgh's work. I loved Erin Brockovich and Traffic, but was not so enamoured with Solaris or The Informant!. However, his films are very stylish and I was intrigued by how he would direct a disaster film.

The story starts with businesswoman Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) who has cheated on her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) with an old flame whilst on a business trip. She is awaiting her plane home and begins to show symptoms which she thinks are the result of jet-lag.

Once she gets home in Minneapolis, she rapidly deteriorates and dies of an unknown and highly contagious virus. The film then goes into several separate stories. The first focuses on Mitch and his daughter Jory (Anna Jacoby-Heron) and how they cope with the breakdown of society all around them. 

The second storyline is on the work of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CWC) and Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) who is trying to control the information about the virus to prevent widespread panic amongst the population. 

This leads to the third tangent which is the work of Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer who travels to Minneapolis to research where the disease has spread and how to prevent it becoming an epidemic.

In the meantime, the fourth strand of the story involves Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) who is a World Health Organization epidemiologist who travels to Hong Kong to find out where the virus originated. 

The fifth element of the film concentrates on the methods used to try to find a vaccine for the virus, led by Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle). The final component focuses on freelance journalist named Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) who writes blogs about government conspiracy theories and uses the way the government has handled the virus outbreak to boost his own profile and earnings. 

There are positives that can be taken from this film; the first is the realism. Many people within the medical research community have confirmed that as far as the science and methodology behind finding a vaccine are concerned, this is fairly accurate. 

Likewise the portrayal of the government agencies has also been praised by those in the know. The fact that the film has decided not to go the way of other disaster movies and either over-simplify everything or over-glamourise the situation should be applauded, and this is what makes it an interesting watch.

I found that the way that the people responded to the virus refreshingly true to life; ultimately people only want to look out for themselves and the ones they love and the film showed this very human trait unflinchingly and without any shame. Every disaster has its heroes and they come in different forms, but unlike other disaster films, Contagion showed the heroes in a very quiet and unassuming way which I found quite appealing. 

I love an opportunity to learn new things and I really did enjoy all the facts that came out during this film. For example: people touch their face, on average, 3-5 times every waking moment and there is a method for calculating the risk of a virus infecting the population. It is nice to watch a film which is backed up by scientific fact.

My main criticism with the film lie with the fact that there are too many storylines. I appreciate that Soderburgh was trying to show the impact of the virus from all angles and while this made the film compelling; it meant that some of the actors were not used to their full potential and some of the storylines just drifted away without a conclusive ending. 

Two storylines in particular were redundant in my opinion; the first being the blogger, which features Law attempting an appalling Australian accent. The second being the Cotillard role which was a shame as I am a fan of her work.

Neither role brought anything to the film and I personally would have preferred other stories be more developed and that there was a more conclusive ending to the film.

Verdict: A fascinating subject which was, in many ways, excellently portrayed in this film. However, it was let down by having too many storylines and a rather 'drift-away' ending. 

It will make you consider OCD as a lifestyle choice and view anyone who has a cold or cough with great suspicion. As a last note, any film that kills off Gwyneth Paltrow in the first ten minutes can't be all that bad...