Doctor Examination

Last night, I went to say the latest viral hit, Contagion. (Wakka wakka!) This movie from director Steven Soderbergh seems to be billed as "Outbreak, but you know, more serious." That is true, but it would probably be even more accurate to call it "Outbreak, but you know, less fun."

Contagion plays more like a documentary about disease outbreak than as an actual piece of dramatic fiction. This isn't to say it's not interesting at times. I have no real idea how accurate the film is about the methodologies of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, but it feels credible and interesting. But ultimately, the movie is supposed to be a work of fiction, filled with interesting characters, and that's where the movie falls flat.

Oh, it has characters. Too many of them. The cast is epic; Steven Soderbergh called every name in his cell phone, and they called every name in theirs. Thus, you end up with one movie that features Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Elliott Gould, Bryan Cranston, and more. It's like the Ocean's Eleven of viral outbreak movies.

Except it's not. Ocean's Eleven had over a dozen characters, and each had a distinct personality. You could invest in nearly all of them, even though some had only minutes of screen time. Here, the story is simply divided into too many subplots, and it becomes too hard to care about everybody. I feel for the plight of Matt Damon's character -- and yet he has absolutely nothing to do with the actual curing of the disease, and so his scenes come to feel tedious and unnecessary. I'm intrigued by Marion Cotillard's epidemiologist, but after she's built up in a few interesting scenes, she vanishes for the bulk of the movie (and not for the reason you might think).

Actually, a better way of putting it might be that the movie feels like it wants to be the Game of Thrones of virus stories, and so you can see that its one hour, forty-five minute run time simply isn't sufficient to do the job. A novel or TV mini-series could have given sufficient space to all these subplots to make them interesting. As a movie, all it does is attract a more A-list cast.

I wouldn't call the movie boring, but it's not exactly entertaining either. I rate it a C- overall, and to get that much out of it, you probably have to be a bit of a science nut. Or have a desire to see a goofy-acting and goofier-looking Jude Law wearing a strange prosthetic tooth.