A black screen. We hear a severe cough. We're already vigilant when, shortly after, a bartender takes a customer's coin and then dials into a cash register. Germs, we're pondering. During an autopsy, we see a dead woman's face, and hear the buzzing of a surgical saw. Her blood-spattered scalp collapses onto her face. Two doctors inspect the brain and stem. We do see nothing, but they're troubled by what they see. A piece of photographic ingenuity and intricate, quietly deliberate editing ahead of the overwhelming majority of wide-release American movies, Contagion is a docudrama about a fictitious but staggeringly real worldwide epidemic. It's a startling supposition of how a new airborne disease could penetrate humans and increase uncompromisingly in startlingly little time.
This notion is already proverbial to us through the seemingly yearly rashes of influenza or swine flu. The journalistic sequence never varies: panicky plans, large-scale roundups, the fight to create a vaccine at the Center for Disease Control, the making and supply of this year's "flu shot." The disease in Contagion is an inexplicable one, flouting seclusion, rebuffing medicine. Soderbergh, as he's demonstrated before, is dexterous at chronicling the multi-narrative via the lives of numerous crucial characters and the chance communications of various others, and this way it illuminates how we don't give each other a virus, but that it's an organism advanced to pursue new hosts. Its bearers die, and like any life form, it must constantly keep ahead of death. Also, his inclusion of the population on the introductory captions for each city in the story is a global education in itself.
The cough we hear before anything else is from Gwyneth Paltrow, a Minneapolis woman returning from Hong Kong. Her husband Matt Damon, evidently immune, is disbelieving that death could so abruptly ravage his life. An analysis exposes a secret appointment of Paltrow's during a layover in Chicago. And yet, she didn't catch the germ through sexual contact. While the director of sex, lies and videotape., Out of Sight and Ocean's Eleven is surely in love with dialogue, Soderbergh's amalgamation of score and montage never take less than top spot in the primacy in his uncompromisingly procedural storytelling. We've seen even minor Soderbergh outings where imagery and score are the overriding narrative machinery, and that occurs here too, and though the ultra-naturalistic jargon and interplay between the international web of characters is essential, Contagion is thickly tiered in pivotal sequences totally without dialogue. Cliff Martinez creates the atmospheric and aural terrain into which Soderbergh interleaves his many fast-sketch characters.
At the tail end of the movie, Soderbergh adjoins a succinct montage unraveling where the virus may have originated, how a handful of degrees of separation there were connecting its source and a woman from Minneapolis on a trip to Hong Kong. It takes no more than a day for the bug to reach a new continent. The film tracks the procedures of techno-thrillers and hyperlink cinema, with subtitles keeping count: Day 1, Day 3, Minneapolis, Geneva, ad infinitum. It tethers to and fro between such linchpins as Laurence Fishburne in the CDC in Atlanta; Kate Winslet in the Epidemic Intelligence Service, who attempts to chase the contamination with ad hoc stopovers; Marion Cotillard, an investigator from the World Health Organization in Geneva. They have teamed up before, are accomplished and function immediately. And in a lab, there is Jennifer Ehle, struggling to hone a vaccine and in the face of the time being lost before she can try it on humans.
Contagion is an uncommonly immersive portrait of existential threat and crowd psychology, about everyday people doing their jobs under horrendous conditions. It's ultimately a race against time between 2 toxic spreads, one of a deadly virus, one of rampant misinformation in the digital age, an eerie highlighting of how the things that make the modern world smaller make it that much more exposed. It's also one of the most tremendously well-shot films of recent release. Soderbergh continually lingers and focuses on the objects touched by the infected that link the global cast of characters and reinforce the multi-narrative style in which he has proved his proficiency before.
This notion is already proverbial to us through the seemingly yearly rashes of influenza or swine flu. The journalistic sequence never varies: panicky plans, large-scale roundups, the fight to create a vaccine at the Center for Disease Control, the making and supply of this year's "flu shot." The disease in Contagion is an inexplicable one, flouting seclusion, rebuffing medicine. Soderbergh, as he's demonstrated before, is dexterous at chronicling the multi-narrative via the lives of numerous crucial characters and the chance communications of various others, and this way it illuminates how we don't give each other a virus, but that it's an organism advanced to pursue new hosts. Its bearers die, and like any life form, it must constantly keep ahead of death. Also, his inclusion of the population on the introductory captions for each city in the story is a global education in itself.
The cough we hear before anything else is from Gwyneth Paltrow, a Minneapolis woman returning from Hong Kong. Her husband Matt Damon, evidently immune, is disbelieving that death could so abruptly ravage his life. An analysis exposes a secret appointment of Paltrow's during a layover in Chicago. And yet, she didn't catch the germ through sexual contact. While the director of sex, lies and videotape., Out of Sight and Ocean's Eleven is surely in love with dialogue, Soderbergh's amalgamation of score and montage never take less than top spot in the primacy in his uncompromisingly procedural storytelling. We've seen even minor Soderbergh outings where imagery and score are the overriding narrative machinery, and that occurs here too, and though the ultra-naturalistic jargon and interplay between the international web of characters is essential, Contagion is thickly tiered in pivotal sequences totally without dialogue. Cliff Martinez creates the atmospheric and aural terrain into which Soderbergh interleaves his many fast-sketch characters.
At the tail end of the movie, Soderbergh adjoins a succinct montage unraveling where the virus may have originated, how a handful of degrees of separation there were connecting its source and a woman from Minneapolis on a trip to Hong Kong. It takes no more than a day for the bug to reach a new continent. The film tracks the procedures of techno-thrillers and hyperlink cinema, with subtitles keeping count: Day 1, Day 3, Minneapolis, Geneva, ad infinitum. It tethers to and fro between such linchpins as Laurence Fishburne in the CDC in Atlanta; Kate Winslet in the Epidemic Intelligence Service, who attempts to chase the contamination with ad hoc stopovers; Marion Cotillard, an investigator from the World Health Organization in Geneva. They have teamed up before, are accomplished and function immediately. And in a lab, there is Jennifer Ehle, struggling to hone a vaccine and in the face of the time being lost before she can try it on humans.
Contagion is an uncommonly immersive portrait of existential threat and crowd psychology, about everyday people doing their jobs under horrendous conditions. It's ultimately a race against time between 2 toxic spreads, one of a deadly virus, one of rampant misinformation in the digital age, an eerie highlighting of how the things that make the modern world smaller make it that much more exposed. It's also one of the most tremendously well-shot films of recent release. Soderbergh continually lingers and focuses on the objects touched by the infected that link the global cast of characters and reinforce the multi-narrative style in which he has proved his proficiency before.