By Kirsten McAlpineThe sound of someone coughing behind you on the bus may not usually be the kind of noise to strike fear into most people. However, if, like me, you’re a big fan of ‘The Stand’ (the novel, not the fairly mediocre mini-series), the sound is liable to fill you with more dread than a room full of Candymen… The fear that Stephen King so effortlessly injected into the first half of his best-loved novel, is what Stephen Soderbergh has managed to translate to the big screen with the release of his global disease thriller, Contagion… Don’t worry, Outbreak this ain’t…. The scene is set in dramatic fashion as we are introduced to a variety of increasingly sick-looking individuals in various locations around the globe, travelling around, infecting others around them, while subtitles ominously inform us of the population of the various cities involved. I’m telling you, suddenly those government swine flu ads are looking more terrifying than Paranormal Activity… And from there, the pace doesn’t let up as the race begins to try to contain and cure a disease that makes the Ebola virus look like man-flu… Every scene is loaded with tension and dread as we follow a variety of characters dealing with various aspects of the crisis, from Matt Damon’s concerned parent, desperate to protect his daughter from the virus, to Marion Coutillard’s World Heath Organisation official on a quest to discover the source of the infection; from Gwyneth Paltrow’s cheating wife who has a huge role to play in the spread of the disease to Jennifer’s Ehle’s scientist who faces a race against time to find a vaccine; from Laurence Fishburne’s Head of Atlanta’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and Kate Winlset as his top doctor, struggling to contain the outbreak to Jude Law’s conspiracy theorist blogger with his own dubious agenda, Soderbergh lets us view the crisis from a variety of angles. It’s a furious jaunt through each storyline, which unfortunately leaves more than a few actors floundering with not that much to do…. Damon and Coutillard suffer in especially underdeveloped roles, particularly as their storylines should be, respectively, the most emotional and the most dramatic in the film, but they are too underdeveloped to really make an impact with the viewer. Instead, Law and Winslet are given probably the most to work with the more meatier storylines to get their teeth into. It’s a shame, then, that Law also tends to do a bit of scenery-munching as well, as his performance is often in danger of slipping into seriously hammy territory… Undoubtedly, there’s enough material to have made this an excellent mini-series, and it’s definitely a minor criticism, but a director like Soderbergh, who of course gave us the excellent Traffic, which had a similarly structured storyline but much more fleshed-out characters, it’s a point that needs to be made… However, there’s no doubt that Contagion is a tense and thought-provoking film that is unsettling enough to be genuinely horrifying at times. It also keeps you guessing, with a fair number of shocks (I don’t want to give the game away, but being a big Hollywood star is by no mean a guarantee that you will survive to see the end credits in THIS movie…). If you hear some-one sneeze or cough near you after watching this, you will definitely have a shiver down your spine… (KMcA/DW)
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Incoming Incoming….Prepare For Evacuation!
