Contagion

That is it. I'm officially losing hope on 2011 for being a great year of movies. Disappointment after disappointment hits theaters every week in this depressing years of movies. Contagion had all the potential in the world to be awesome. But instead, it wastes its great cast and gives moviegoers a tedious, safe, uninspired and unsatisfactory drama that's equivalent to 106 minutes of pure nothingness.

Contagion has a pretty solid premise, or at least, I thought it would have had a pretty solid premise. Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns from her Hong Kong trip with a cold (or so she thinks it's a cold). Soon after, she's having seizures, memory problems, and eventually collapses into a condition which leads to her death, leaving behind a devastated, fragile, and very confused husband; Mitch (Matt Damon). Pretty much, the whole movie traces how the disease spreads; dealing with a doctor in Atlanta (Laurence Fishburne), a doctor sent to Minneapolis (Kate Winslet), a blogger in London (Jude Law), and another doctor who traveled to Hong Kong to find out what is the origin of the disease (played by Marion Cotillard). The movie traces how all these people relate to each other in more ways than once. So pretty much, it's Babel or Crash but with sickness. Fun times.

One of the big problems I had with Contagion is the structure. Unlike amazing movies like Crash that are able to connect all these stories and make them interesting & worthy of attention, Contagion just fails at that. You barely know anything about any of these characters so when bad things start happening to them, your reaction is just like....SO? Because of the billions of stories going on, so many actors are wasted as a result. While some are given very little to do (Kate Winslet and Laurence Fishburne), others turn in some of their worst performances yet. Matt Damon is a total stiff as the lead. He rarely acts like a human being throughout the entire movie and is totally devoid of any emotions. A scene later on in the movie where he's viewing his deceased wife's picture is supposed to be heartbreaking but it just comes off as bad Lifetime. Jude Law is another actor who really really doesn't do well here at all. There's just something so pretentious about the way he delivers his lines. You would think a movie about such intelligent people would present these characters as....PEOPLE. I've seen cartoons with more life-like qualities than these characters. Oh, and they totally waste Marion Cotillard as well. Her scenes were probably some of my favorites so of course they have to cut them short. Good times.

For a movie about such a deadly disease, Contagion is rather dull as well. Nothing exciting (minus the early scenes with Gwyneth Paltrow) really happens at all. Where's the tension? Where's the excitement? They barely touch on that, instead we get nonstop, neverending discussions about the disease. How did this movie even get labeled as a Drama without any drama? 95% of the time it reads as an insufferably awful documentary on some channel about learning. Da fuck? I've seen zombie & end of the world movies that present more situations about what people do in the face of disease than this one. The plot is just so dull and flimsy, I don't really get how the director thought he could stretch this like putty into a feature length movie.

And when watching the preview for Contagion, do you feel like this is the type of movie to present some new, relevant, and suspenseful information about the effects of disease? Yeah, well I was suckered too. Contagion tries to be intelligent, but as someone once said, "An empty barrel makes the most noise". There's absolutely no point to Contagion except for that disease can spread quickly from person to person. And the only people that is news to are those who lick the driveway for dessert. For everyone else....NAHT groundbreaking news. There's nothing informative or new about Contagion. There's not even a twist. Information which Matt Damon finds out about his wife after she dies COULD HAVE BEEN A TWIST. BUT THEY DON'T TWIST IT! NO TWIST! I'm pissed. Granted, any type of twist that was attempted at this point would have probably failed, at least it would have proved for being an entertaining failure instead of the tedious sludge that the moviegoer has to tread through. And just when you're about to get out of the sludge, Contagion actually has the nerve to throw on 90 more pounds of mold and toxic garbage. The ending is an absolute cop-out. A confusing ending only due to the amount of nothingness that was present.

Contagion is a cliched, tedious, disaster of a movie that had potential to be everything but what it turns into. A great cast. An accomplished director. A premise that had the potential to be interesting. But it sells all those things to the devil, resulting in a movie that lacks tension, originality, story, or even a reason to care. You know a movie is sinking like the Titanic when you watch a character on screen get her head cut open and think.......boy, she's a lucky girl.

1/4