Contagion Poster

Contagion is a new disaster movie that takes those old 70′s movies to a higher level and will have you walking around with a “jug” of hand sanitizer after you leave the cinema. This movie is deep, shocking, and plays masterfully on all of our fears. Soderbergh uses a huge “A” list cast and subtle clues that keep you on edge. In the opening scene, we see how the germ is spread when an obviously infected Gwyneth Paltrow coughs into her hands and then takes another drink of her coffee. The waitress takes the cup with the germs and then goes to the cash register and rings up a sale. Now the virus is on her and the cash register. You know other employees will be touching that register all day and the money inside, which will spread the deadly virus.
Contagion come at you from so many different perspectives it brings you in and you feel you are right there with the cast. Matt Damon is a father, who is immune to the disease, that shows us the lengths parents will go to in order to protect a child. Jude Law plays an Internet blogger who is wildly into conspiracy theories. Law is criticised as he propagates his theories of government suppression of the “little guy” but he finally get vindication as he is right. There are more sub plots and they all combine to add to the chaos and fear.
What this movie does best is explore the way “misinformation” only adds to the panic in a situation like this. Soderbergh show us how people over react when there is no clear information coming from a solid source. It is scary to see how “mob rule” takes over quite easily in a world where there are so many theories being put out by so many different sources. It is so real because we are now blasted 24 hours a day in real life with so much information from the news media that we can clearly see some truth in this story. Contagion is deep, dark, scary, and so close to our real life world that it will make you wonder when it will really happen.

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