- Location: Century Boulder
- Most of the good disaster movies are not even remotely realistic. At best, they tend to invoke a series of unlikely accidents or improbable coincidences while at worst...well, you often end up with aliens and/or monsters attacking some big city. In fact, the only decent and realistic disaster movie I can name off the top of my head is The China Syndrome, and even that one was helped out a lot by the real-life improbable coincidence at Three-Mile Island. With all this in mind, I'm pleased to report that the engrossing and alarmingly plausible Contagion is, and I mean this in a good way, a complete disaster.
- Instead of the usual meltdowns and monsters, the microscopic villain of Contagion is a deadly and highly contagious virus. The movie initially only hints at the disease's origins in Hong Kong, but pretty soon people like jetsetter Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) are coming down with flu symptoms that rapidly degenerate into fatal convulsions. As Beth's husband Mitch (Matt Damon) mourns and frets over his remaining children, medical professionals across the world slowly begin to realize the severity of the situation. At the CDC, Dr. Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) ships the dedicated Dr. Mears (Kate Winslet) to Minneapolis to track a breakout while committing the accomplished Dr. Hextall (Jennifer Ahle) to the lab to search for a cure. In the meantime, those lingering shots of doorknobs and the constant echoes of coughs are enough to make even non-germaphobes in the audience more than a little nervous.
- Lest you imagine that all the action's in Atlanta, however, the film makes it clear that this is quickly becoming a worldwide event. While the independent-minded Professor Sussman (Elliott Gould) rebels against a quarantine order in California, political and military types (Enrico Colantoni and Bryan Cranston) start worrying about whether this is a terrorist attack. Halfway across the world, WHO investigator Dr. Orantes (Marion Cotillard) heads to Hong Kong to track down the source of the outbreak with the help of a local scientist (Chin Han) who has more pressing concerns on his mind. Meanwhile, a dubious e-reporter named Krumwiede (Jude Law) takes a page from the anti-vaccination movement's playbook to push some snake oil as people start dying by the thousands. Who said that realism had to be pretty?
- In a film whose commitment to believability and startling attention to detail (hey, Kare 11!) impress at every turn, the thing that really struck me was the accuracy with which Contagion portrayed its scientists. Instead of getting stuck with a small number of painfully inauthentic "miracle worker" types, we're treated to a imperfect collection of specialists, each of whom just wants to do their part to help. In their roles Winslet, Ahle, Gould, and Fishburne are all perfect as real scientists who are also real people. The only pointedly unrealistic aspect of the production arrives at the film's end when we get both a cure and an explanation for what happened on that mysterious Day 1. In the real world, I doubt humanity would be so lucky in either respect.
- In addition to a lot of Minneapolis footage, I even caught a shot of the University of Chicago.
- I didn't get to list all of the actors, but Demetri Martin and John Hawkes were also in this film.
