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Released by: Warner Brothers
Released on: January 3, 2012.
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet
Year: 2011
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The Movie:
Steven Soderbergh's latest film works on a simple and effectively horrifying premise - a nasty virus has been let loose and it's spreading around the world. That's really all there is in terms of set up, and the film is more concerned with exploring how various parties and people react to the situation than in how the situation occurred in the first place. As the body count starts to mount across the globe, we see, through typically media blitzed eyes, how the World Health Organization reacts, who economies tumble and how politicians politicize things while the lives of an ensemble cast made up of Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet hang in the balance.
There are bits and pieces of the various characters' lives that matter here - Damon plays a guy named Mitch who is waiting for his wife, Beth (Paltrow), to come back from a business trip - when she arrives, she's sick. Lawrence Fishburn plays Doctor Ellis Cheever, the man from the Center For Disease Control looking for a fix to this problem along with Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) and a few others, while Jude Law plays a guy named Alan who sits inside and blogs about all of this online, fueling the different conspiracy theories that are going around. As the various players try to go about their lives, paranoia sets in and tension in the outside world becomes thick and borderline dangerous.
Shot and paced with fairly clinical precision, Contagion is surprisingly emotionless for a film about the possible end of life on the planet as we know it. Soderbergh casts his net pretty wide here with his ensemble cast and while that worked with the Oceans films that made him a Hollywood A-lister, this time around scaling things down a bit to a more intimate level might have resulted in a film with more impact. As it stands, things get spread pretty thin here and we don't get to know the characters as well as we might want to, given that we need to make that critical emotional investment in them for the film to work. Add to that a few bizarre plot twists that, while likely intended to up the action in the film (which, to be blunt, is lacking) wind up feeling out of place and forced. A perfect example is a kidnapping subplot that should have added some excitement but which instead simply disrupts the flow of the film all together.
There are, however, some great ideas at work here and some very strong performances and the visuals are always impressive as well. The film does a good job of making it feel very real and very possible, which adds to the tension considerably - it's just a shame that there wasn't more character exposition or development than what we get here, and as such, the end result is a movie that is okay but which should have been a lot more involving than it turned out to be.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Contagion looks good in AVC encoded 1080p high definition 1.78.1 widescreen as it's presented on this 50GB Blu-ray disc, though you have to take into account that Soderbergh has shot it with a bit of a low-fi style and as such it isn't going to impress the way something like Avatar might. That said, detail is decent, colors look nice, flesh tones look like flesh tones and not wax and if the black levels tend to waver and contrast with it, the good outweighs the bad. You get the impression, at least, that the movie looks the way it's supposed to look.
A lossless audio option is provided by way of an English language DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio mix, though standard definition DTS tracks are also available in French, Spanish and Portuguese with subtitles provided in English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean and Mandarin. All in all the DTS-HD track is good and it handles what the film throws at it with ease. It's not as bombastic or enveloping as other more active mixes tend to be but it does offer clear dialogue, properly balanced levels and some effectively punchy sound effects.
Extras on this disc are surprisingly slim, but there are a few goodies hidden underneath the animated menu screens starting with an eleven minute featurette entitled The Reality Of Contagion. This short documentary explores the reality of pandemics and basically makes the case that what we see happen in the film could happen one day in real life. Interestingly enough, it also notes how the media tends to jump all over things like this. Aside from that, there's a five minute collection of interviews with various experts in the Contagion Detectives Section and a two minute featurette that shows how virus' work in the real world entitled How A Virus Changes The World. None of these are all that in-depth but they are interesting enough that you'll want to check them out. As this is a combo pack release, a DVD copy and a Digital Copy of the film are also included and the Blu-ray disc is Blu-ray Live Enabled so you can go online to dig up more stuff if you're so inclined.
The Final Word:
Contagion is good where it should have been great but if it spends too much time with too many characters that don't wind up mattering, at least it provides some decent tension and a thought provoking premise. Not a perfect film, but one worth seeing and if Warner's Blu-ray release is a bit light in the supplements, it does offer up the film in very solid quality.
NOTE: Images below are from the DVD.
