"Contagion"

So... epidemics. What have we gotten about them? Well, we've gotten more than a few scares about various epidemics. SARS, H1N1... We've gotten a lot of them, but they haven't really gotten out of hand.

So we naturally think that the CDC could possibly be overreacting, right? Right?

Yeah, let's just say that today's movie doesn't agree with that sentiment...

Contagion

A viral epidemic has just broken out all around the world. It has affected millions of lives, and so many other things are occurring around it. The race to stop it, headed by Dr. Ellis Cheever (Lawrence Fishbourne) is hitting a few rough ends, conspiracies suggested by Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) are circulated, a random father (Matt Damon) has to deal with it along with his daughter, and many more people are affected.

And from there, it runs the full gamut of how people would react to this. And I think this comes to show that while the CDC may overreact, at the end of the day maybe it's better that we overreact than underreact to a thing like this. What this movie shows is not pretty. I think this is kept so thanks to the fact that nothing is oversensationalized in this movie, and it gives a deeper sense of reality to the whole thing. Thus, it makes us more involved in everything.

Well... it gets us more involved in what's going on eventually. The biggest problem with the movie is that it takes a little too long to get us emotionally invested in everything that's going on. It underplays a lot of things; almost all of the characters are introduced without any sort of backstory, the fact that there are a lot of them keeps the movie from really zeroing in on any one set of characters, and details about them get filled in as we follow the movie.

But if you stay with it, Contagion turns out to be an intelligently-made 'what-if' concerning what could happen if an epidemic really broke out. The underplaying of the elements that could lead to sensationalism are ultimately what make the whole movie work, because it just presents the situation as is. From this, there arises a sort of honesty about the whole thing that is ultimately more effective than doting on the more dramatic aspects of everything.

3.5/4

Most definitely worth checking out.

This is Herr Wozzeck Reviews. I'll see you guys next time.