Pete Moye’
Arts Button
With its all-star cast and brilliant directing, “Contagion” lives up to the hype. The movie is about therapeutic experts trying to solve a deadly infection that spreads uncontrollably worldwide.
Returning home to her family from a business trip to Hong Kong, Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), the protagonist, starts feeling a little bit ill.
Later on, she starts quivering and foaming from the mouth and within a few hours she is pronounced dead at a hospital.
After hearing this, her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) has to deal with having to break the news to their son, who also dies later on from the same illness as his mother.
The film starts out very alarming, but as soon as the doctors get to work on finding the cure and we see more people dying, the film gets very intense.
Damon, as usual, does a very brilliant job acting, especially when he had to play a guy whose wife has just died.
He’s not the only member of the cast that does a tremendous job in their significant roles.
Jude Law, as a political blogger and Marion Cotillard, as a supermodel, do a terrific job as well.
Other members of the cast include Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne and Bryan Cranston.
It’s perhaps one of the most realistic films this year, which kind of makes it predictable.
It’s a true to life reaction of a virus that spreads and how people (especially doctors) react to it.
Doctors try to find the cure as quickly as possible and conspiracy bloggers with a large fan base try to connect it to government corruption.
The dialogue isn’t rather surprising, the direction and shots are astonishing, the acting is intriguing, and the pace of the film is enough to help the viewer understand what is going on.
The pace of the film is crucial because of the difficult plot or structure of the film.
Director Steven Soderbergh uses a fast-paced style very well throughout the film to reinsure the film’s thriller disaster genre.
It is what any thriller junkie can hope for when they step into the theater.
“Contagion” is realistic and can be compared to a version of a zombie movie where if one person is infected it is quickly spread and effects other people.
By all means, this is a thoughtful and crucial film that uses a lot of metaphors on politics and terrorist threats.
Its devastation reveals the moral strength and weakness of people.
“Contagion” does a fine job of giving you paranoia on anything you do by making the audience think of effective long-term consequences, as if you didn’t have enough things to worry about already.
