Tagline:
Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t touch anyone.

Wide Release Date:
September 9, 2011

Directed by:
Steven Soderbergh
Written by:
Scott Z. Burns
Produced by:
Michael Shamberg, Stacey Sher, Gregory Jacobs

Starring:
Marion Cotillard
Matt Damon
Laurence Fishburne
Jude Law
Gwyneth Paltrow
Kate Winslet
Bryan Cranston
Jennifer Ehle
Sanaa Lathan

PREGAME THOUGHTS

COVID was scary, wasn’t it folks? It shook me to my very core! Shortly after the pandemic started, this 2011 film shot to the top of most-watched movie lists. And for a good reason! It’s about a pandemic!

That’s all I know. I’m going to watch it now.

THE 400(ish)-WORD SYNOPSIS

Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) was on a business trip in Hong Kong. During a layover in Chicago, she meets up with her affair partner. Two days later she returns to her Minneapolis suburb, feeling sick. After suffering a seizure in her home, husband Mitch (Matt Damon) takes her to the hospital. She dies. No one knows what happened. His step-son, 6-year-old Clark, also endures similar symptoms. He dies. No one knows what happened. Mitch remains well and un-seizured; immune. He starts quarantining his daughter obsessively.

Once this mysterious illness starts spreading, the Department of Homeland Security meets with the CDC to discuss the possibility of biological warfare. Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) of the CDC tasks Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) with travelling to Minneapolis where she does a little contact tracing. Eventually, having come into contact with those who came into contact with Beth, she gets sick and dies during her work. The virus continues to spread, people die, people get scared, people get violent, people start looting, and people start getting on Santa’s naughty list.

Draw me like one of your French girls.

Throughout it all, a conspiracy theorist and blogger named Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) starts fomenting suspicion of the virus as well as asserting the public that he has cured himself with forsythia. This causes people to start raiding pharmacies. Alan is arrested for faking infection and conspiracy.

Scientists and doctors work on finding the nature of the virus as well as a vaccine. It is discovered that it is a bat/pig-borne combination with a cell culture that is hard to crack due to its rapid mutation. After Cheever directs only one lab to work on the virus due to its virulence, one Dr. Ian Sussman (Elliott Gould) is instructed to stop research and destroy his samples. He continues research anyway against orders and cracks the cell culture. One Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) develops a vaccine with this information. More info about the virus is understood, and the mortality rate isn’t great.

Hextall, against regulations, injects herself with the beta vaccine. It works. The CDC rolls out the final version of the vaccine via a birthday lottery system. Beth is eventually noted as patient zero.

Mitch stages a prom at home for his daughter and her boyfriend, whom Mitch didn’t allow contact with each other for months. He finds pictures in his digital camera of Beth and finally, after months of emotionlessness fortitude, cries.

A flashback shows how Beth got infected. A bat drops a half-eaten banana into a pig farm. The pig is slaughtered. The meat is cooked in a Hong Kong casino. The cook shakes Beth’s hand without washing his hands first.

This is why you only shake hands that weren’t infected by bat-pig disease.

TOM’S DISCUSSION CORNER

TOPIC 1 — COVID-19

Of course I’m going to talk about COVID and its parallels with Contagion. Why wouldn’t I? That’s the obvious direction to go into here. What do you think I am, not a hack?

COVID scared the shit out of me between March and probably about May or so, 2020. I tried to distract myself by watching Shameless and reading American Gods! Oh yeah, and I still had to work fulltime. There was that, too. The last thing I really wanted to do was watch a movie about people dying from a mysterious virus that was spreading uncontrollably across the entire world. I barely even wanted to wake up in the morning, goddamnit. I was already going through a depressive episode, no need to throw worldwide chaos and certain death into the mix!

The biggest fuck-you of all was that my wife was pregnant with our second child, and we found out the sex of the baby one week before lockdown. Once the BRUHAHA began, we started hearing stories about women giving birth in hospitals without ANY visitors or partners present. My wife — for the sake of anonymity, let’s call her Gal Gadot — was so nervous about the prospect of having a baby in a creepy COVID-riddled hospital that she took out her Lasso of Truth and wrapped it around my neck! It worked out though. By August they were letting one person into the hospital with her, so I got to be the lucky chosen one who watched a weird lump of flesh get pushed its way out of some beat-up private parts!

I guess what I’m saying is that COVID affected us all in different ways. No one I know actually died from COVID though lol

Especially when Matt Damon was around to shoot the virus right in the face!

TOPIC 2 — General Movie Thoughts

Oh yeah, Contagion! I figured that nearly six years after a pandemic started (and continues maybe? I haven’t watched the news in three decades) would be a fine time to watch a movie about a pandemic without getting all weird and nervous about what could be a very real circumstance. The virus, named MEV-1, kills the individual within two days of contraction. I remember when there was no research done on COVID-19 yet and there were about 200 confirmed cases, I was like “yeah right whatever” but if that fucker killed someone in two days then I would’ve headed for the hills! The COVID-free hills!

Most of my attention was paid toward the parallels of Contagion and real life, especially Jude Law’s role as the blogging skeptic conspiracy theorist. Holy shit, dude. Law’s claims that forsythia cured his MEV-1 is just like fucking Joe Rogan shilling Ivermectin. Uncanny. I also heard all-too-familiar terms such as “masking”, “social distancing” and “novel virus”. Contagion did a great job not only covering the science and medicine of a deadly virus, but also the frustrations of medical personnel trying to contain it, cure it, and receive flak from the non-medical community who think they know more than doctors. Slow rollouts of vaccines with lotteries, mass graves, riots, these were all possibilities, and in some cases realities, during COVID times. Scary shit, bro.

I’m as skeptical about MEV-1 as I am about my hairline!

I thought it was an interesting decision to have Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie for roughly four minutes total, if even that. They could have put any Susie Schmoe in her role. Then Kate Winslet dies! It made you think that Laurence Fishburne’s days were numbered, or that Bryan Cranston was going to get hit on the head with an anvil. With no particular focus on any one character, with each one representing a different facet of a worldwide disease — Matt Damon with heartbreak and family, Laurence Fishburne with medicine and science, Bryan Cranston with military response, Jude Law with public reaction — the story is more about surviving than anything else. “Normalcy” is returned at the end of the movie in the form of a private prom night for his daughter and her boyfriend in Matt Damon’s house, hinting at an impossible return to the true normal, which I thought was a nice touch. And the very end showing how Gwyneth Paltrow contracted the bat/pig-borne virus in the first place? Eerie and unsettling.

Stay out of China, I guess.

IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!

To promote this film, Warner Bros. Pictures Canada built two giant Petri dishes treated with bacteria and fungi and set them in a Toronto storefront window. Over several days, the bacteria and fungi specimens grew to spell out the name of the film and form biohazard symbols.
The bacteria and fungi then took over Toronto like in The Last of Us where they all became horrible zombies! Then Toronto got better. The end.

Fears of the COVID-19 virus that began overwhelming the world in March 2020 have prompted movie fans to re-examine this movie. According to Warner Brothers, the film was listed at the 270th position among its catalogue titles at the end of December 2019. Since the beginning of 2020, this film has jumped to second place, bested only by the Harry Potter movies.
Nothing like a pandemic to scare you into watching a movie that scares you about a pandemic.

Most of the main cast took very little pay to be in the movie. Gwyneth Paltrow worked basically for free and shot her scenes in less than 3 days.
“Basically for free” probably means $7,000,000 in Hollywood terms. I’d work basically for free too.

Unnervingly, watching in February 2021, after around the first anniversary of confirmed cases arriving in Europe, this film now feels like an all-star docu-drama about the spreading of COVID-19, and it’s evolution into a global pandemic.
This isn’t trivia, this is some 15-year-old writing his opinion in an IMDb Trivia section. Go fuck yourself, 15-year-old. I was 15 once and I needed my face punched regularly.

This is the first of two films from 2011 in which Matt Damon plays a widower. The next film would be “We Bought a Zoo (2011).”
Way to get typecast, Matty.

Given what is now known about airborne pandemic spread from the poor management of COVID-19, virtually none of the interactions between characters after they realize how serious it is involve social safety protocol, even though this is mentioned as a factor when considering transmission of the virus. It is understood actors do not like to obscure their faces on screen, but since the movie was attempting to present scientifically-accurate scenarios, all of the board room meetings depicted should have been conducted with the characters wearing masks.
This is some Big Lie shit. Are you in Dr. Fauci’s pocket? Not today, cuck.

According to this PowerPoint presentation, COVID is one of the leading causes of GameStop riots.

IS IT WORTH A WATCH?

Yeah, this movie was interesting. Probably more so in a COVID world since it was fun to see all the parallels between a 2020 pandemic and a 2011 movie about a pandemic. Also, Jude Law’s balding head. And Gwyneth Paltrow dying within 10 minutes. And Elliot Gould’s “acting”.