Opening on a black screen with the sound of a harsh cough. The first image is that of a bartender picking up a customer’s coin. There’s an emphasis on the touching. Germs, we’re being shown, is the primal enemy here. Then a woman — played by Gwyneth Paltrow — on a Hong Kong business trip has a layover in Chicago before returning home to Minneapolis. The film posits her as “patient zero,” the person who would be catching the mystery virus during her trip, only to have her symptoms fatally worsen and spread.
Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 thriller “Contagion” resurfaced to the zeitgeist this past year, stronger than ever. As the Covid-19 virus started spreading from mainland China to other countries around the world, the nearly decade-old movie managed to go viral and gain relevance in ways we never wanted it to. According to Warner Bros., the film started off 2020 listed as No. 270 among its catalog titles, but by February it was their most-watched title. By March, “Contagion” was the seventh most popular film on iTunes, with the average daily visits on piracy websites increased by 5000%.
Regarding its resurgence in 2020, screenwriter Scott Z. Burns told The Washington Post, “It is sad, and it is frustrating. Sad because so many people are dying and getting sick. Frustrating because people still don’t seem to grasp the situation we are now in and how it could have been avoided by properly funding the science around all of this. It is also surreal to me that people from all over the world write to me asking how I knew it would involve a bat or how I knew the term “social distancing." I didn’t have a crystal ball — I had access to great expertise. So, if people find the movie to be accurate, it should give them confidence in the public health experts who are out there right now trying to guide us."
Unsurprisingly, “Contagion” was garnering its biggest audience 10 years later, when an actual pandemic was happening. The interest wasn’t like that for the movie back in 2011, as the film only grossed a middling $76 million domestically and the alarms the movie was sounding on the very real possibilities of a global pandemic happening were ignored as mere fiction.
“Contagion” reunited Soderbergh with long-time screenwriting partner Scott Z. Burns for a thought-provoking and tense medical thriller that explored not only the seriousness of a worldwide pandemic, but also the urgent response needed from the scientific community to find a vaccine. It was an undeniably frightening movie, especially when seen in today’s lenses.
The fictional virus showed in the film (called MEV-1), also started in Asia and is easily transmitted through touch. However, MEV-1 is far more lethal than Covid-19, killing 26 million people worldwide. Soderbergh, much as he did in “Traffic,” skillfully tells his story via a mosaic of characters, their lives being intertwined through professional or casual interactions. The way Soderbergh and Burns depict the worldwide reaction from scientists, citizens, conspiracy-tinged bloggers, and politicians alike makes “Contagion” feel eerily similar to today’s situation.
The virus in “Contagion” is a perplexing one, resisting isolation, spreading like wildfire, and highly deadly. The most frightening observation Soderbergh and Burns offer us is that for this, or really, any to survive, it needs to always stay one jump ahead of death, having to jump to the next body before its carriers die. At the very end of the film, Soderbergh adds a brief explanation of where the virus may have come from (if only it were that easy to find out in our own reality) and the very few degrees of separation there were between its origin and the Gwyneth Paltrow character. The point Soderbergh seemed to have been making may have been learned too late by most of the world’s governments; all viruses originate somewhere, and in the age of air travel and globalist trading, they can reach a new continent in a day.
In a year plagued by movie delays (no pun intended), it was very hard to find a film that captured the zeitgeist quite like “Contagion”. It’s the movie that defined 2020. An amalgam of all the fears and paranoia people had to contend with these last 9 months.
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