You can say many things about Soderbergh, but he is always touching important subject and look them straight in the eye when others don't.
This seem to be one of these cases...and to think it wasn't that long ago from the release of this film!
Are You Watching Closely? You're an idiot
Yes, I'm very critical of Soderbergh, but this was an important and prophetic film. Some issues I have with this one though is the sloppy editing and half-finished feel to the script. For instance it begins with Soderburgh's voice telling Gwyneth Paltrow, "Hi this is John Neal, the man you just had sex with in a hotel room." WTF? I'm pretty sure this was meant as simply a prompt for her to respond, and he planned to replace it with actual dialogue later, but got lazy and didn't. At least I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt here.
And we never quite know why she is going all over the place in Hong Kong, the casino, the restaurant, and why she on her way home decides to do a stopover in Chicago to have an affair even though she has a family. Not really believable, but just shows what would happen if the absolute most negligent person caught a similar virus and went all over the place spreading it, unintentional as it may be. All these hundreds of dye come up snake eyes..i.e. a one in a billion chance. Anyway what's up with that angry old lady who yells at Kate Winslet?
But I thought the ending was very effective, showing the origin, an how the company she worked for destroyed the habitat so bats had to go elsewhere, one picks up a tainted fruit, drops it in a pig pen, which ends up on a chef who doesn't wash his hands and voila! I hope after seeing this people will think twice about eating meat and contributing to pollution, deforestation, etc.
Now that we are in the midst of SARS CoV 2 which is much less severe than the one depicted here, lets learn all the lessons before it's too late!
"And we never quite know why she is going all over the place in Hong Kong, the casino, the restaurant, and why she on her way home decides to do a stopover in Chicago to have an affair even though she has a family. Not really believable, "
Totally disagree with this. It's not hard to believe a person would behave that way at all, looking at what people will do in the real world. I think a viewer can fill in the blanks as to why she might be doing these things. The fact that it's not spelled out for us doesn't make it unbelievable.
First of all - he didn't write the script. Scott Z. Burns wrote it.
Secondly... what we are seeing now is more akin to wag the dog movie rather than contagion.
More like he predicted the past. Viruses existed before 2011, people have been making films about them for decades. In fact he didn't even predict the past because he didn't write the script anyway; he just made another tedious colour-coded film about a subject with lots of potential. If you have to give credit, give it to Scott Z. Burns or the virologists and epidemiologists who provide the substance.
shareAgreed. Soderbergh is so overrated.
shareIt's a pretty authentic take on the subject. They actually did research and didn't take too many liberties to dramatize.
After going through Corona, I do think a pandemic that was as deadly as the one in the movie would probably have caused more chaos and breakdowns in the social order though.
China is probably already working on it, lol..
shareYou're right that the social chaos would be insane, considering how it has been during Corona. However, it is the prolonged duration of the pandemic which is the biggest problem for society, it's even been artificially increased via the precautions.
The Contagion disease would have been dramatically easier to contain. In the movie it has very high infection rates, but the fast death would exactly make it possible to contain it. It is different with Corona because some people have very mild symptoms or not at all, and it has a long incubation time for some people. This makes it very difficult to contain.