Contagion

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  • #16
    Re: Contagion

    I saw it today and very much enjoyed it. Fishburne and Law stand out with solid performances. The directing is very sleek. It is slow at times but picks up. The ending is haunting as well.

    Comment


    • #17
      Re: Contagion

      Originally posted by loopdesign View Post
      I think Damon's line reading of - "can I talk to her?" in the trailer is one of the best I've seen in a long time. Chilling and real.
      I think it was in last week's Time magazine where they asked Damon ten questions, and he mentioned that scene was improvised on the spot after talking with the real ER doctor.

      HH

      Comment


      • #18
        Re: Contagion

        a cold film but sobering as hell. imho, solderbergh's unique stylistic approach from traffic syncs beautifully here with the rapid spread of the disease. great performances and the ending brings it home.
        life happens
        despite a few cracked pots-
        and random sunlight

        Comment


        • #19
          Re: Contagion

          *Spoilerish*

          Surprisingly flat. I kept expecting it to really..uh..break out and show extreme desperation, chaos, impossible moral choices, apocalypse. It approached that territory, but never really got there. No real catharsis.

          I'm of two minds though. I appreciated its serious, procedural, level-headed approach to the drama.

          It seemed to tackle too many themes/characters without nailing any of them [more spoilers]:
          adulterous patient zero (Paltrow); muckracking, possibly corrupt blogger (Law); diligent but compromised CDC chief (Fishburne); grieving husband (Damon); kidnapped WHO worker (Cotillard); independent/maverick researcher (Gould); sacrificial field worker (Winslet); teen lovers; secondary Homeland Security and foreign health worker characters.

          That's a lot of story fodder...too much really, and none of it/them really got its/their due.

          I like serious movies and dramas, but this one was too scattershot for any of it to be very effective, and the movie confounded my expectation that it would be really thrilling.

          To borrow from another thread: what was the theme of this movie?
          Last edited by Done Deal Pro; 09-15-2011, 05:10 PM. Reason: Fixed text. No need for brackets

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          • #20
            Re: Contagion

            Originally posted by Donreel View Post

            To borrow from another thread: what was the theme of this movie?

            Fear is contagious. So is humanity.

            I didn't see the film. That's just a guess.
            "A screenwriter is much like being a fire hydrant with a bunch of dogs lined up around it.- -Frank Miller

            "A real writer doesn't just want to write; a real writer has to write." -Alan Moore

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            • #21
              Re: Contagion

              I think the theme was...

              SPOILERS








              Don't eat pork in Hong Kong.

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              • #22
                Re: Contagion

                Originally posted by Donreel View Post
                To borrow from another thread: what was the theme of this movie?
                Contagion Theme.
                "Forget it, Jake. It's Hollywood."

                My YouTube channel.

                Comment


                • #23
                  Re: Contagion

                  Originally posted by Donreel View Post

                  Surprisingly flat. I kept expecting it to really..uh..break out and show extreme desperation, chaos, impossible moral choices, apocalypse. It approached that territory, but never really got there. No real catharsis.
                  I'm of two minds though. I appreciated its serious, procedural, level-headed approach to the drama.
                  ____________________________


                  So, more realistic than clichéd? Kind of Hitchkock-ian maybe?
                  I'll be there! I'm so tired of tentpole formulas..!
                  Last edited by Done Deal Pro; 09-15-2011, 05:10 PM. Reason: Fixed code. Please use preview feature to make sure all looks correct.

                  Comment


                  • #24
                    Re: Contagion

                    Originally posted by cuppajoe View Post
                    Originally posted by Donreel View Post
                    [spoilerish]

                    Surprisingly flat. I kept expecting it to really..uh..break out and show extreme desperation, chaos, impossible moral choices, apocalypse. It approached that territory, but never really got there. No real catharsis.

                    I'm of two minds though. I appreciated its serious, procedural, level-headed approach to the drama.
                    ____________________________
                    So, more realistic than clichéd? Kind of Hitchkock-ian maybe?
                    I'll be there! I'm so tired of tentpole formulas..!

                    Call it, "Scenes From A Pandemic". Some interesting. Some dull. Only occasional excitement. Yes, generally realistic. A lot of exposition and explaining and biological jargon, possibly interesting to science-minded viewers but boring to others. Almost a tutorial on epidemiology and disaster response. Nothing Hitchcockian about it. A thinking man's "Outbreak", minus the govt conspiracy and action heroics; a cautionary tale.

                    Comment


                    • #25
                      Re: Contagion

                      Originally posted by Donreel View Post
                      Call it, "Scenes From A Pandemic". Some interesting. Some dull. Only occasional excitement. Yes, generally realistic. A lot of exposition and explaining and biological jargon, possibly interesting to science-minded viewers but boring to others. Almost a tutorial on epidemiology and disaster response. Nothing Hitchcockian about it. A thinking man's "Outbreak", minus the govt conspiracy and action heroics; a cautionary tale.
                      Yup. I like it more when I think about it. I thought it was far better than Outbreak or any other pandemic movies because of the style. It was cold, serious, and didn't play up the emotions.

                      It also reminded me of The Social Network. It just sorta had this soft climax and then a slow burn to the ending.

                      Comment


                      • #26
                        Re: Contagion

                        I stand by Soderbergh's choices. He's a master of his craft. I think the movie is a commentary piece along with being a genre film. I bought two bottles of hand sanitizer after the movie. It did it's job.

                        Comment


                        • #27
                          Contagion

                          Originally posted by Optimus View Post
                          I liked it the first time I saw it in the '90s when it was called "Outbreak."
                          I liked its sequel, written in 1912, which apparently remains in development hell.

                          "It was in the summer of 2013 that the Plague came. I was twenty-seven years old, and well do I remember it. Wireless despatches-"
                          ...

                          "We talked through the air in those days, thousands and thousands of miles. And the word came of a strange disease that had broken out in New York. There were seventeen millions of people living then in that noblest city of America. Nobody thought anything about the news. It was only a small thing. There had been only a few deaths. It seemed, though, that they had died very quickly, and that one of the first signs of the disease was the turning red of the face and all the body. Within twenty-four hours came the report of the first case in Chicago. And on the same day, it was made public that London, the greatest city in the world, next to Chicago, had been secretly fighting the plague for two weeks and censoring the news despatches-that is, not permitting the word to go forth to the rest of the world that London had the plague.

                          "It looked serious, but we in California, like everywhere else, were not alarmed. We were sure that the bacteriologists would find a way to overcome this new germ, just as they had overcome other germs in the past. But the trouble was the astonishing quickness with which this germ destroyed human beings, and the fact that it inevitably killed any human body it entered. No one ever recovered. There was the old Asiatic cholera, when you might eat dinner with a well man in the evening, and the next morning, if you got up early enough, you would see him being hauled by your window in the death-cart. But this new plague was quicker than that-much quicker."
                          JEKYLL & CANADA (free .mp4 download @ Vimeo.com)

                          Comment


                          • #28
                            Re: Contagion

                            I felt like it was a movie version of the the show House without House. It was satisfying and had a great cast, but never did it grip me and cause my hands to clench and sweat in a great suspense. If anything it made me not want to itch my nose the entire time I was sitting there.
                            Joan: What does the "T" stand for?
                            Jack: Trustworthy.

                            Comment


                            • #29
                              Re: Contagion

                              Originally posted by Hilario113 View Post
                              I'm always a little wary of these 'intangible antagonist' type movies.
                              The problem with Contagion isn't that it's an 'intangible antagonist' movie, the problem is it's an 'intangible protagonist' movie. I.e., there's no protagonist in this film, there are just a bunch of stars rotated on-and-off the screen in seemingly random order.

                              Matt Damon's the biggest star, but he's on-screen maybe 1/8 of the time, and he's not much of a protagonist. He just happens to have been married to patient zero. That's his sole claim to fame, aside from which there is no reason whatsoever that the movie should follow his character instead of any of the millions of other people affected by the pandemic. Indeed, he's immune to the disease, so there's even less at stake for him than any of the other millions of people. (True, he has a daughter to protect, but most of the millions of others also have loved ones in peril.) But anyway, we're following Damon, at least 1/8th of the time, and thank goodness it is only 1/8th of the time because nothing much happens in his story. He's locked up by himself in quarantine until they determine he's immune. He says maybe because he's immune they can use his blood to make a cure, but no, that's not an option. So he's sent home, with his teenage daughter. They try to get out of the city, but the National Guard says they're not allowed to leave, so Damon decides to...meekly accept this and return home. He and his daughter then hang out in their house for the rest of the movie. There are hints of potential danger -- a neighbor boy sniffing around his daughter (of course ultimately it turns out the boy was never infected and thus never a danger), they go to a grocery store and encounter looters and...nothing bad comes of that, some armed bad guys invade a house across the street and then...don't ever come near Damon's house, etc. -- but nothing ever comes of them. Damon never does anything proactive, he just reacts, impotently, to what are mostly imaginary dangers.

                              Some of the other characters (Winslet, Fishburne, etc.) are more interesting and more proactive, but they're not protagonists either, since they're also only on-screen less than 1/8th of the time and none of them do anything particularly decisive (except for the one doctor who injects herself with monkey vaccine to prove it works, thus ending the pandemic, and I suppose Jude Law's character, who spreads silly rumors so he can, in a completely unnecessary subplot, make money speculating in fake cures).

                              The film is certainly educational, and since I like learning I found it interesting in a History Channel kind of way, but I wouldn't say it was engaging or entertaining.

                              I guess I admire the filmmakers' decision to stick closely to the science, which entailed a refusal to turn the pandemic into an all-out apocalypse, but that detracted from the entertainment value. I.e., the scientists spelled out the scope of the pandemic for us, they even did the math for us, to make sure we understand that this bug is going to kill, in a worst case scenario, only a few percent of the population. While that would certainly be a tragedy, it's not the end of the world. The film depicted the breakdown of social order -- looting and rioting and burglars -- but it was all fairly tame.

                              It's almost like the filmmakers went out of their way to blunt any possible emotional impacts. E.g., Damon's wife (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) dies early on, but we know that the day before she was in Chicago boinking another man, which sort of dampened by empathy for Damon's heartbreak when she died -- I was thinking, in the back of my mind, "You poor deluded idiot, here you are devastated about your wife, but she was cheating on you -- she was probably going to leave you in a month or two." The fact that she was cheating on him had no relevance whatsoever to the plot of the movie, it didn't factor into anything in any way, so why would the filmmakers make that choice? Likewise, Damon's son also dies after catching the bug from Gwyneth, but then we're told it was his step-son, and, hey, I'm not the one saying a step-son isn't as precious as a real son, Damon as much as says it when he tells his daughter, "yeah, yeah, losing my step-son was a bummer, but if something had happened to you..." (not a direct quote, except for the part after the comma, which is). Again, the fact that the boy wasn't Damon's biological child is of no relevance whatsoever to the plot -- it seems like a choice deliberately made to lessen the emotional impact of his death. Strange.

                              In sum, I'd still give the movie three stars out of four, just because (1) it held my interest all the way through, and that's increasingly rare these days; (2) it was refreshing to see a film in which scientists are the heroes, rather than villains; (3) I suppose it must have worked on some level because for the rest of the day I was hyper-conscious about touching any kind of surface and kept wishing I had a bottle of hand sanitizer. But overall it never engaged me emotionally and left me feeling flat.

                              Comment


                              • #30
                                Re: Contagion

                                Originally posted by Paul Striver View Post
                                The problem with Contagion isn't that it's an 'intangible antagonist' movie, the problem is it's an 'intangible protagonist' movie. I.e., there's no protagonist in this film, there are just a bunch of stars rotated on-and-off the screen in seemingly random order.

                                Matt Damon's the biggest star, but he's on-screen maybe 1/8 of the time, and he's not much of a protagonist. He just happens to have been married to patient zero. That's his sole claim to fame, aside from which there is no reason whatsoever that the movie should follow his character instead of any of the millions of other people affected by the pandemic. Indeed, he's immune to the disease, so there's even less at stake for him than any of the other millions of people. (True, he has a daughter to protect, but most of the millions of others also have loved ones in peril.) But anyway, we're following Damon, at least 1/8th of the time, and thank goodness it is only 1/8th of the time because nothing much happens in his story. He's locked up by himself in quarantine until they determine he's immune. He says maybe because he's immune they can use his blood to make a cure, but no, that's not an option. So he's sent home, with his teenage daughter. They try to get out of the city, but the National Guard says they're not allowed to leave, so Damon decides to...meekly accept this and return home. He and his daughter then hang out in their house for the rest of the movie. There are hints of potential danger -- a neighbor boy sniffing around his daughter (of course ultimately it turns out the boy was never infected and thus never a danger), they go to a grocery store and encounter looters and...nothing bad comes of that, some armed bad guys invade a house across the street and then...don't ever come near Damon's house, etc. -- but nothing ever comes of them. Damon never does anything proactive, he just reacts, impotently, to what are mostly imaginary dangers.

                                Some of the other characters (Winslet, Fishburne, etc.) are more interesting and more proactive, but they're not protagonists either, since they're also only on-screen less than 1/8th of the time and none of them do anything particularly decisive (except for the one doctor who injects herself with monkey vaccine to prove it works, thus ending the pandemic, and I suppose Jude Law's character, who spreads silly rumors so he can, in a completely unnecessary subplot, make money speculating in fake cures).

                                The film is certainly educational, and since I like learning I found it interesting in a History Channel kind of way, but I wouldn't say it was engaging or entertaining.

                                I guess I admire the filmmakers' decision to stick closely to the science, which entailed a refusal to turn the pandemic into an all-out apocalypse, but that detracted from the entertainment value. I.e., the scientists spelled out the scope of the pandemic for us, they even did the math for us, to make sure we understand that this bug is going to kill, in a worst case scenario, only a few percent of the population. While that would certainly be a tragedy, it's not the end of the world. The film depicted the breakdown of social order -- looting and rioting and burglars -- but it was all fairly tame.

                                It's almost like the filmmakers went out of their way to blunt any possible emotional impacts. E.g., Damon's wife (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) dies early on, but we know that the day before she was in Chicago boinking another man, which sort of dampened by empathy for Damon's heartbreak when she died -- I was thinking, in the back of my mind, "You poor deluded idiot, here you are devastated about your wife, but she was cheating on you -- she was probably going to leave you in a month or two." The fact that she was cheating on him had no relevance whatsoever to the plot of the movie, it didn't factor into anything in any way, so why would the filmmakers make that choice? Likewise, Damon's son also dies after catching the bug from Gwyneth, but then we're told it was his step-son, and, hey, I'm not the one saying a step-son isn't as precious as a real son, Damon as much as says it when he tells his daughter, "yeah, yeah, losing my step-son was a bummer, but if something had happened to you..." (not a direct quote, except for the part after the comma, which is). Again, the fact that the boy wasn't Damon's biological child is of no relevance whatsoever to the plot -- it seems like a choice deliberately made to lessen the emotional impact of his death. Strange.

                                In sum, I'd still give the movie three stars out of four, just because (1) it held my interest all the way through, and that's increasingly rare these days; (2) it was refreshing to see a film in which scientists are the heroes, rather than villains; (3) I suppose it must have worked on some level because for the rest of the day I was hyper-conscious about touching any kind of surface and kept wishing I had a bottle of hand sanitizer. But overall it never engaged me emotionally and left me feeling flat.
                                That's nothing new for Soderbergh. See: Traffic. The formula itself is old as dirt. It's not somehow pioneering in the writing world to have an ensemble cast with no standout protagonist. See: Robert Altman.

                                I agree with you completely on your third point.
                                Joan: What does the "T" stand for?
                                Jack: Trustworthy.

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