Contagion

3½ stars (out of four)
Rated PG-13
Warner Brothers
Available on: DVD, Blu-ray and digital download

Steven Soderbergh has a catalogue of great movies, including “Traffic” (2000), “Erin Brockovich” (2000), “Ocean’s 11” (2001) and “The Informant!” (2009). Now, he can add “Contagion” to that list.

The film takes a multi-pronged look at the spread of a virus that kills within days and leaves international healthcare professionals baffled. Viewers first meet Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), a traveling businesswoman who returns to her Minneapolis home after a trip to Hong Kong. After suffering a seizure, she dies in the emergency room, leaving her husband (Matt Damon) baffled. In the meantime, people from around the globe begin succumbing to similar symptoms, convincing professionals from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization that a pandemic is imminent.

The movie follows its characters, including doctors played by Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard and Kate Winslet, as they try to grasp the severity of the situation. Soderbergh also considers the broad social consequences of an uncontrolled outbreak. Normally right-thinking people – even those who aren’t infected – begin to panic, and a crusading blogger (Jude Law) begins to command the respect that only medical professionals typically receive.

Soderbergh has always been good at taking expansive issues and filtering them through a personal lens, and he does that here. A number of the characters demonstrate how terrifying a global epidemic would actually be and how helpless a simple virus can make even the most educated and affluent individuals.

The cast, which also features John Hawkes, Elliott Gould and Bryan Cranston, is a fantastic group, which is important because no single character is central to the movie’s success. Despite the talent in every realm of production, it’s Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns who deserve the bulk of the credit. Without proper guidance, a film like “Contagion” could have easily bogged down in technical details or simply become irredeemably gloomy. Soderbergh and Burns avoid those trappings, delivering a film that is appropriately somber, yet never overbearing or dull.

DVD extras include a short on how viruses can change the world.

Source: Highbrow Magazine