Music, Style & Culture

Contagion

A tedious, poorly-structured mess only notable for the wow factor of its stellar cast.

Released in cinemas 21st October 2011.

For this deadly serious outbreak thriller, Steven Soderbergh employs the same lazy tactic he used for the Ocean's 11 films - assemble your gorgeous, Oscar-winning chums and let the star power compensate for mediocrity.

On paper, Contagion should have been another blistering ensemble drama in the Traffic mould. Instead, Soderbergh's second foray into sci-fi (following the underrated Solaris) is a tedious, poorly-structured mess only notable for the wow factor of its stellar cast.

Gwyneth Paltrow opens the film as a cheating wife (the morality is heavy-handed) infected with a rapidly spreading, fast-evolving killer virus after a business trip to Hong Kong. Soderbergh effectively shows how easily the flu-like disease spreads via credit cards, buses and glasses in various montages, but with the fast editing and jaunty electronic score there's little sense of dread. Paltrow pops her clogs, leading to one mightily disturbing scene (yet another gruesome head trauma for the actress), and it's left to hubby Matt Damon to sit in a quarantined hospital room getting angry.

Meanwhile, disease control bigwigs Kate Winslet and Laurence Fishburne team up to monitor the virus, with Jennifer Ehle the scientist working on answers in the film's only really interesting, well thought-out scenes. Marion Cotillard stars in a peculiar strand, as the WHO epidemiologist who ends up kidnapped by a Chinese scientist (Chin Han) more interested in saving his tiny village than saving the world. Of course it's left to the "civilised" US to cure the planet.

The most absurd, but inadvertently entertaining, plot strand lands with Jude Law's subversive, conspiracy-loving online journalist - cue lots of snark about bloggers. As people who runs websites obviously aren't allowed to look like Jude Law, Soderbergh disguises the actor's attractiveness by gluing on a snaggle tooth. Except it's so poorly done you can see Law's flaw-free front tooth underneath. With a wavering Aussie accent, Law's character is used to state the obvious about online scare-mongering; it's all very patronising and unrealistic (someone with 12 million unique visitors probably won't bother handing out flyers).

There are too many themes for the inadequate, cringeworthy script - there's the vaccine development and distribution, the breakdown of society, the bureaucrat nonsense and the various sub-characters (John Hawkes is given a tiny, thankless role as a janitor/plot device for Fishburne's heroism). It eventually becomes clear the film wants to hunt down patient zero and the vector, and at least that final moment satisfies. The actual panic of the virus spreading is filmed with all the panache of a cheap television show - it's embarrassingly dull.

The incredible cast barely interact with each other, so don't get too excited about the Talented Mr Ripley reunion, and all of them phone in their performances. Contagion doesn't know what kind of sci-fi thriller it wants to be. It doesn't go for the cheesy drama of Outbreak, the visceral intensity and bleakness of 28 Days Later, nor the claustrophobic, scientific uneasiness of The Andromeda Strain. In its attempts at dour realism, it fails to create empathy, tension or drama, therefore fails as a disaster movie. Soderbergh would've been better off creating a mockumentary than this half-baked, inconsequential thriller.

Rating: 4/10