Contagion review

Quick Description:

Contagion is about an outbreak of a new disease, and follows several characters as they try to adapt to the situation. It takes cues from real life, and takes advantage of the fears people have of disease and epidemics.  

Quick Review:

Rating: 14/18 Tacos.

Why? Well.

Contagion is a great movie, filled with lots of great actors, and they’re the kind of actors who are famous because they’re good, not good because they’re famous. It did a really good job of creating relatable characters, who responded to situations realistically, though at some points less realistically than at others. The Film-makers were invested in realistically portraying a pandemic, where no one is safe. This feeling is established early on, though for more on that you’ll have to read past the spoiler warning. Generally everything seemed really genuine. They really embraced the era we live in, With a character whose profession was a blogger, Characters are shown dealing with the legality around trying to save their families, and the compelling relationship between matt daemon and his daughter seemed very realistic and nowadays. So go and rent Contagion now, especially if you like… Movies.

Analysis:

**spoiler alert**

RIP Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the lady from Batman. This movie has an impressive A-list body count (not to mention countless others,) which brings me to my first point: Matt Daemon’s unemotional acting after his wife dies. His portrayal of grief never evolves past stunned, even though the movie’s timeline is like six months. But all in all he does a good job, would’ve been nice to see a tear or two.

First what the hell moment: Gwyneth Paltrow dies in the first five minutes. This was a great way to add tension, and make the disease seem very threatening. It’s pretty rare for main characters (or at least very famous ones) to die in a movie at all, much less in the first few minutes. It shows that anyone can die in this movie.

The movie features a cool flashback sequence showing where the disease might have come from, and how the outbreak moved from person to person. One jarring element however was how quickly they got rid of disease. Everything went from being the worst that it’s ever been to suddenly being amazing. This happens in movies a lot. And it really annoys me. Seems like they put a lot of effort into building up this crisis, and then just ended it really quickly. Seemed like an easy way out, I feel like even 10 more minutes of film for the portion where they find the cure would have been good.  

So if you’re watching Contagion on an airplane, be ready to feel vulnerable to diseases, if Contagion is any indication, you’ll get one. Try not to catch any diseases.

Blog you next time.