It seems that epidemics are the flavour of the month at the cinemas, just as the winter flu season arrives and governments start issuing a rash of new scaremongering warnings of pandemics, sponsored by Big Pharma (viral marketing?). Earlier this month was David Mackenzie’s Perfect Sense, about a virus that caused human senses to fail one at a time. Then there was indie film Phase 7 from Argentina that we showed at our Oktoberfest (and The Gerber Syndrome we showed at SFL10 back in May). Last week we saw Cillian Murphy in another lonely battle against a threatened pandemic in Retreat, an indie flick from Vertigo, which conceptually plays out like a cross between Dead Calm and Right at Your Door, except with a Hebridean setting. Now Steven Soderbergh, the master of mixing indie cinema with Hollywood star power, has tackled this epidemic of disease films with Contagion.
The film starts on Day Two, as business traveller Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow) is in Hong Kong where she is shown eating and interacting with several people, before returning home to her husband, played by Soderbergh regular Matt Damon. No sooner does she arrive home than she develops a cough and a fever, as do the people she had contact with, and before long people are dropping like flies around the world. Cue the arrival of pandemic experts Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslett, along with, WHO, politicians and the military as they try to contain the spread of the unidentified disease and develop a cure/vaccine.
Like Iñarritu’s Babel or Fernando Meirelles’ LFF opener 360, it is a multi-stranded, internationally-set story with a star-studded cast that also includes Jude Law, as a Julian Assange-like online conspiracy theorist/journalist/blogger (“Blogging isn’t journalism, it’s graffiti with punctuation” he is told), Marion Cotillard and Bryan Cranston. Unlike Babel, and more particularly 360, Contagion actually has characters you care about, and if you don’t, the chances are they aren’t going to survive because the director is quite happy to kill off his A-list cast. This film also maintains a good level of tension throughout mainly because, unlike many pandemic films, there is an air of credibility about the disease. In fact, if you have a tendency to hypochondria or paranoia you will feel uncomfortable on public transport after watching it. It does for coughing on buses what Jaws did for swimming in the sea.
Where most sci-fi films tend to focus on post-apocalyptic/pandemic scenarios, this current batch of indie films, as well as the big budget Rise of the Planet of the Apes, concentrate on events leading up to and during the outbreak. It may be something in the collective psyche, or simply a cinematic reaction to the overhyped avian and H1N1 scares of the last couple of years. Whatever the reason, Contagion more than manages to capture that sense of panic the mainstream media managed to evoke. In fact, it is more successful at inducing fear than all the government run health warnings, which raises a whole new debate about the power of cinema and the public's overall distrust of what they are told through traditional news channels.
