Anybody else see it yet? I thought it wasn’t bad. It’s a solid thriller, with a couple unnecessarily side plots that don’t go anywhere.
I couldn’t believe they actually put Laurence Fishburne’s cheesiest line right in the trailer. (“We don’t have to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that!”)
The only movie cliche that bugs me more than the Slow Clap is the Spontaneous Riot. It goes like this:
Disaster worker: we’re temporarily out of food/supplies/water/vaccines.
Everybody: DESTROY EVERYTHING!!!11
It happens about three times in this movie, and bugs the shit out of me because riots just don’t work that way in real life. They tend to build slowly, over hours or days. You don’t have a town square full of perfectly calm disaster victims suddenly spaz out on you when they learn they’ll have to wait an extra hour for their MRE. It’s a dumb plot device.
I saw it a few weeks ago and liked it a lot. I liked that it wasn’t an apocalyptic movie, where the end result was a world like The Stand or The Road. Tens of millions died in Contagion, but hundreds of millions did not die. That’s more realistic.
Marion Cotillard and John Hawkes seemed to get short shrift. I’ll bet there was more filmed of their stories that got left on the cutting room floor.
In the You Heard It Here First Dept., I’m going to foolishly bet that Jennifer Ehle gets an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She stole the movie out from under all those other big names as the calm, dedicated and selfless (well, reckless) scientist Abby.
I just saw this and liked it a lot. Easily in the top 3 movies I have seen this year. What I found so surprising was how low key it was give the subject matter. A lack of energy hurts most thrillers but here it worked well. The entire movie was like a slow boil.
The respect for science was refreshing and while I am far from an expert, seemed plausible to me. And I liked how it just told its story and then waked away. No guns a’blazing or cheezy races against time.
I just got back and I liked it…although I’m a bit hesitant to touch anything now.
Honestly, I thought Jack from Just Shoot Me was going to be a rogue scientist who was bent on evil when he didn’t destroy his samples at first. I am so glad it didn’t turn out that way.
What made this movie so good, at least imho, was that I can see it as realistic. The entire world didn’t end, 99% of the people didn’t get wiped out, scientists were doing their best to figure it out, etc. It actually made biology seem interesting.
I liked that aspect of it as well. It was well grounded and entirely plausible with very little dramatic license taken. Even the one building on fire was just on fire and not EXPLODING WITH HELLFIRE!!! The army responsible for quarantine never had to shoot anyone.
On the other hand, the movie is fairly realistic and reality is boring. I loved it, but I’ll sit and read books on the 1918 flu pandemic for fun. People going into this looking for a thriller are going to find merely the coolest and best cast Discovery channel special ever.
I loved it. I’d recommend it, but I just don’t think it will catch. That’s reality for you.
It was an enjoyable couple hours in a time when there are very few other movies to watch, but not something I’d want to see again. The detail bits were effective, day by day pacing, shots of possibly infected surfaces, etc., but the overall story just didn’t make sense to me. Towering Inferno made sense, in its own way, but this one didn’t. I agree that the riots were over the top, that the urging by the CDC guy to his friend to ‘get out of town’ wasn’t nearly the huge error that it was made out to be, and that the Jude Law character was a joke. Hmm, maybe I didn’t like it as much as I thought.
Question though: There is a scene at the end when all seems to be under control, that shows the two CDC guys in full hazmat outfits going into the special vaccine chamber. One opens the nitrogen freezer and pulls out a bunch of containers, lets us sort of see them, then puts them back and seals it up. That’s it. What was that about? The scene had to mean something, else why include it. I thought the bottom container looked a bit thawed, my wife thought one of them had a different label than the others. Were they trying to tell us something that I am too slow to figure out?
The other containers were labeled H1N1 and Smallpox; they were storing the last samples of the virus, it having now been presumably defeated.
(Of course this is pretty nonsensical; H1N1 refers to a whole category of flu viruses, and flu viruses don’t get eradicated, they just mutate and recycle themselves.)
It was nice to see Demetri Martin get some film work, though. That guy is hilarious.
Wil Wheaton twitted: Anne and I just saw Contagion. It’s appallingly bad. Do yourself a favor and avoid it like the plague. DO NOT LET OUR SACRIFICE BE IN VAIN!
Gee, I guess it would have been a lot better if some sweater-clad teenaged CDC intern had single-handedly tracked down Patient Zero, sequenced the virus’ DNA, and devised a vaccine, thus saving the world. And maybe at some point he could have “reversed the polarity” on a centrifuge.
I saw this Tweet and I was surprised by this reaction. I could see someone complain that it was boring. I don’t agree but I can see someone make that complaint. It isn’t a traditional thriller. In a traditional thriller, the disease would just be set dressing and blogger character would probably be the hero and he is racing against time to release the truth about the disease before an Evil Corporation can profit off it. In this movie he was revealed to be a liar and a Jackass. Or possibly you have a CDC Agent racing across the globe to find Patient Zero before some unnamed other country does because her (it would definitely be a Her) blood holds the KEY TO THE CURE!
Someone above described the movie as the best cast Discovery Channel documentary ever. I think that is a pretty fair description and I really enjoyed it.
I just got back from this and liked it. I do have one question though, do they really go after patient zero like that in these cases? Can they really get that much information from finding the origin.
Also, I thought it killed too quickly to travel so fast.
I loved that the homeopathic maniac was the bad guy. But it seemed to lack a “story”. Was the politician from Chicago who was flown back supposed to be Gwyneth’s lover? For that matter, did they ever say what happened to the lover?