Soderbergh preys on our worstest fears (second worst after The Road coming true?!) and gives us a plausible apocalyptic nightmare of germs and opens it on 9/11 weekend. HE REALLY KNOWS HOW AMERICA LIKES IT. Contagion is basically JAWS but with coughing instead of sharks. He also knows that secretly, for all her GOOP NEWSLETTERING AND WEALTHY YOGA-ING, we do want to see Gwynyth Paltrow looking really bad and also getting her brain sawed open.
She totally looks like her real life husband in this one, no?
She plays the harbinger of the near-end of humanity, one casual drunken evening and indiscreet afternoon and then, ouila, humanity is plowed down. It’s gratifying because she’s not the hot prissy princess for once. She is the shark.
Also, perhaps for plot-ease, the government is fundamentally good, FEMA is effective, scientists are noble, as are everyone at the CDC and WHO and especially Matt Damon who is allowed to play the father of a teenager–they don’t want an actual old dude, so they just keep him unshaven and unstyled and verging on a second chin and hope we forget that that would have made him a ninth grade father.
Matt Damon playing a grown-up teen father in the hit thriller, Contagion
Real ensemble all star cast so you don’t get super scared for real because Marion Coitillard is there in a $4,000 Celine pantsuit or w/e to pull us up short of panic and “OMG what would I do?”. I would not be altruistic and good like these doctors, I would kill and serve the neighbors dogs to provide for my children! The great parts of total horror film audience gasping cliche shots in this film–like someone coughing and touching a door handle at a school and the camera just lingers on the handle–it makes for tingling terror and also it’ll make you want to cover yourself in a thick film of antibacterial handrub and live on a distant houseboat and take no visitors ever.
I recommend it. I got caught up in it. Oh, and Jude Law is gross and forced to wear a wooden tooth, Abe Lincoln style, that hangs from his mouth like a broken shutter. Great touch, making him so extremely British as to have a little poop tooth.
Loved all the parts where Jude Law is just wandering cheerfully through post-apocalyptic San Fran on those hilariously steep hills in his homemade biohazard suit like NO BIGGIE
Kate Winslet’s character was so noble! Who could be so noble!? When she’s running in slow-mo to desperately put a mask over the face of the dying man in the bus stop! Poor Kate Winslet
Paltrow is in this film for like MAX three minutes.
Actual thought I had during viewing of this film: “Laurence Fishburne is such an incredible eye-and-face-actor!”
I loved how realistic and slow and affectless it was. Like yes, you would be mildly panicked but then months would go by and it would get sort of normal, and you’d just be sitting around in your house with your incredibly bored teenager texting her boyfriend constantly.