Healthcare professionals, government officials, and everyday people find themselves in the midst of a pandemic as the CDC works to find a cure.
COVID-19 was a wake-up call to the world. After being inundated with Hollywood “virus” movies for years, “The Andromeda Strain, “Flu,” “The Cassandra Crossing,” “Outbreak,” and “Contagion,” the world finally took notice and concluded that, in all reality, an airborne virus could literally close down the planet and bring everything, and everyone, to a screeching halt. There are other films I could mention, “28 Days Later,” “World War Z,” and “I Am Legend,” but we are not talking about fictional zombie outbreaks, but a real-life pandemic that took lives and made us all realize just how vulnerable we really are.
The film starts with PR executive Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returning home to suburban Minneapolis after a business trip to Hong Kong. Not feeling well, she attributes it to jet lag, but two days later, she is dead from an unknown illness. Soon after that, the CDC learns of Beth’s symptoms and the mysterious deaths of two other people who had also returned from Hong Kong and passed away under similar circumstances. It soon becomes apparent that there is a mysterious airborne virus that is killing people, for which there is no cure. It goes from infecting a small handful of people to millions worldwide, shutting everything down and turning the world into a dystopian nightmare.
It is now up to Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne), who works for the CDC, and his two colleagues, Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, and Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard), an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization, to try and trace the virus back to its origins and hopefully, locate patient zero.
While the virus in the film is fiction, writer Scott Z. Burns consulted with Larry Brilliant, renowned for his work in eradicating smallpox, to develop an accurate perception of a pandemic event. The film is shot conventionally, but there is a constant discomfort that permeates throughout the entire movie because so much of what we see and hear onscreen would eventually happen in real life nine years later with COVID-19, and it is terrifying just how accurate the film was at predicting such an event.
The film makes no room for humor, and, in most cases, this would be a mistake as humor can sometimes help offset unfluctuating seriousness, but because the story centers around a pandemic that, at the time it was made, could really happen, it is literally no laughing matter. The performances by all involved are excellent, and Soderbergh infuses the film with elements of the techno-thriller, where we start with Day 2 and eventually work our way down the daily ladder, only for Soderbergh, in the film’s final scene to backtrack to Day 1 and show where the virus originated from and how it spread so quickly.
“Contagion” is a thriller that relies more on dialogue-driven scenes than action spectacle. And for a thriller, that is a rare feat as audiences today, watching a film of this ilk, would expect flesh-eating zombies to take over the entire story, but Soderbergh created something even scarier, a scenario that could happen in real life, and, nine years later, it did.
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