This promised to be better than most other disaster films with all-star-casts, not because of the SAT word title but because it’s directed by Steven Soderbergh. He makes smart thrillers like Ocean’s Eleven and Out of Sight. And indeed, in a genre where clichés are pandemic (and Pandemic would have also been an excellent title), most are avoided here. Working from a script by Scott Z. Burns (who did The Bourne Ultimatum and Soderbergh’s The Informant, both with Matt Damon), Soderbergh crafts a film that reminded me more of his adaptation of Traffic than of movies about deadly meteors or volcanoes or global freezing, or even of Outbreak, since I didn’t see that one. Instead of being unimaginatively set in Los Angeles, the locations flit between San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis, Geneva, Hong Kong, and so forth. Instead of evil scientists or crazy genius ones working in home labs, the portrayal of the medical establishment is mostly benign. Laurence Fishburne plays the one with a bit of depth, working at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. And, best of all in my view, the film doesn’t take up half the movie with blubbery sentimentality in which a father‘s reuniting with his estranged son, or a farmer’s regaining his faith, as a billion people die is supposed to constitute a happy ending. (Yes, I’m calling out you, Day After Tomorrow and Signs.)
Yet not only is the cheese factor missing, but also some of the excitement of those bigger productions. For a film about a killer plague, it’s kind of…sterile. Some brainy stuff in the beginning—like Kate Winslet’s epidemiologist explaining the ways some disease can spread faster—gives ways to fairly expected, but somehow not visceral, scenes of panic spreading along with the pandemic. That is, it evokes surprisingly little pathos for all its realism (though Winslet does her best), and not that much intellectual satisfaction either. That last is to say, whereas Jaws made me worry about shark attacks, this didn’t make me worry about a new disease, which is odd because the latter is clearly more of a threat. I’d have liked to like this more because you can tell Soderbergh made an effort to make things realistic.
Besides Winslet, Damon as a newly widowed father whose wife just might have been the first victim, brings the most human element to the story. I could, however, have done without Jude Law’s conspiracy-minded, slightly humorous blogger character, who’s meant to represent the crazies who will attract attention in troubled times. Smaller roles go to Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sanaa Lathan, Elliott Gould, and Bryan Cranston, bringing the celebrity total to an epidemic level that slightly distracts in a serious-minded film. Distracting is about the most that can be said of the movie overall.
viewed 9/7/11 at Rave UPenn [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/7–8/11 and 9/12/11
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