Contagion (**3/4)

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.

IMDB link

viewed 9/7/11 at Rave UPenn [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/7–8/11 and 9/12/11

28 Weeks Later (***1/2)

? It’s been six months since a virulent plague turned Britain into a nation of bloodthirsty zombies. American military have occupied the country and herded the survivors into the supposedly safe “Green Zone.” But, inevitably, the Yanks get too cocky, mistakes are made, and atrocities are committed. Stabilizing the country may take much longer than expected. Along with a couple of the soldiers, the story focuses on brother-sister survivors and their dad (Robert Carlyle).
+ I liked several things about this sequel to 28 Days Later, not least that it doesn’t try to be a carbon copy of its predecessor, which you don’t need to have seen to watch this. You only need to know that sharing body fluids with an infected person (e.g., getting bitten) will quickly turn you into one of them. There’s a new director and writers, which is usually a bad sign, but here it means the story can go in a different direction, with as much emphasis on how the American NATO forces are confronting the virus as on the individuals facing it. The way that the virus is reintroduced is novel, but the overall vision is most compelling. The vision is people behaving stupidly, and fearfully, when they’re scared. With one notable exception, there are few heroics here. The infected are not the only ones to act cruelly, as tender instincts are obviated by the need to survive. There are some brutal scenes, but the violence feels disturbing, not thrilling as in a slasher movie. Handheld camera work gives the movie a docudrama feel at times.
- The characters are thinly drawn. Never explained is why one particular infected person is able to retain some memory of who he was as well as expertly stalk a particular group of survivors. The handheld scenes are as confusing as frightening.
= ***1/2 Children of Men stripped of pretentiousness.

[reviewed 5/11/07]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0463854/

V for Vendetta (***1/4)

Moving on from the Matrix trilogy, the Wachowski brothers score with another near-future tale set in a London ruled by a fascist.

After the mediocre Matrix sequels, I was happy to have the Wachowskis moving on to a new franchise. They’ve adapted Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s 1989 graphic novel (though not directed it) into a smart thriller that restores the balance between ideas and plot that made the original Matrix appealing. It’s set sometime in the near future in London, where the prime minister has been replaced by an iron-fisted chancellor (John Hurt) who’s exploited the fear generated by a recent plague. (The U.S. has apparently undergone an even worse calamity, but we don’t learn the details.)

Of the movie’s two major characters, one is wearing a mask the entire time; the other is played by Natalie Portman. She’s the office-drone counterpart to Keanu Reeves in the first Matrix movie who’s likewise offered a choice between risk and complacency by a pretentious, powerful stranger. She doesn’t like the repressive government, but is understandably troubled by the mystery man’s extreme methods of opposing it. A startling development forces her to decide whether his targeted terrorism is justified. The movie gets a little slow in the second half. It’s not an action movie, and in some ways reminded me more of Batman Begins than anything. However, in that movie, the masked man didn’t believe in assassination. There are all kinds of political parallels you can draw, but it works just fine as a standalone story.

IMDb link

posted 9/6/13