Review of Contagion (2011) by Official C — 18 Sep 2016

I think expectation is what sunk this film for me when I saw it in the theaters 5 years ago. I was really hoping for a film like Outbreak which would focus more intently on the fight to find the cure. While Contagion certainly looks at the people who are seeking a way to save lives, the movie endeavors to take a more broad look at how a pandemic would affect society as a whole.

The film is presented in what I call the collage format as it weaves together a bunch of small stories that all relate to the central theme, but don't always interact with one another directly. I'm not a big fan of collage movies, because I have found that they all have the same problems for me.

First of all, they jump around between stories so rapidly that it's hard to really get to know the characters in order to form a strong investment. Just when I'm starting to enjoy the Kate Winslet story we have to break suddenly and spend the next 10 minutes with Laurence Fishburne.

By the time we get back, Winslet's story basically ended without us being there for it. Collage problem number two is the fact that there are always some of the stories that don't get enough attention for them to flourish (or they just plain suck) and this creates a strange contrast when juxtaposed with much better plot threads in the same film.

The real big offender here was Marion Cotillard's kidnapping that came across as a sad afterthought. The third problem that these collage films often struggle with is blending the tone of all the different stories.

This was less of a problem in Contagion because every story was bleak, so they worked reasonably well with one another. I actually enjoyed Contagion more this time because I went in knowing what to expect, but I still don't think that the best way of telling a story about the deadly threat of infectious disease is to latch onto the Love Actually model of story-telling.

It's a reasonably entertaining mess of a film.