Plot summary (from the studio): An international traveler reaches into the snack bowl at an airport bar before passing her credit card to a waiter. A business meeting begins with a round of handshakes. A man coughs on a crowded bus….

One contact. One instant. And a lethal virus is transmitted.

When Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns to Minneapolis from business in Hong Kong, what she thought was jet lag takes a virulent turn. Two days later, she’s dead in the ER and the doctors tell her shocked and grieving husband (Matt Damon) they have no idea why.

Soon, others exhibit the same mysterious symptoms: hacking coughs and fever, followed by seizure, brain hemorrhage…and ultimately, death. In Minneapolis, Chicago, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, the numbers quickly multiply: one case becomes four, then sixteen, then hundreds, thousands, as the contagion sweeps across all borders, fueled by the countless human interactions that make up the course of an average day.

A global pandemic explodes.

At the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers mobilize to break the code of a unique biological pathogen as it continues to mutate. Deputy Director Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) tries to allay the growing panic despite his own personal concerns, and must send a brave young doctor (Kate Winslet) into harm’s way. At the same time, amid a rising tide of suspicion over a potential vaccine—and who gets it first—Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) of the World Health Organization works through the network of connections that could lead back to the source of what they’re dealing with.

As the death toll escalates and people struggle to protect themselves and their loved ones in a society breaking down, one activist blogger (Jude Law) claims the public isn’t getting the truth about what’s really going on, and sets off an epidemic of paranoia and fear as infectious as the virus itself.

Warning: Spoilers below!

Liked:

• I tend to like movies with ensemble casts made up of famous faces. This helps me keep everyone straight, even when there is outright character overload, such as in this film.
• I liked that the film jumped right into the story without a long preamble and without wasting 14 minutes establishing characters and their routines.
• There was no miracle cure here. The vaccine took a good, long time to develop, which is what would most likely happen in real life.

Disliked:

• Since most of the big “action” happened off screen, it was hard to get emotionally involved in this movie. I mean, the virus was supposed to have caused a “global pandemic”, yet we saw no real signs of death and destruction. After Paltrow, the boy, and Winslet, most of the deaths were off screen. The vaccine was developed off screen, too, which means there was nothing to watch except random scenes of people acting like lunatics.
• WTF was up with Jude Law’s teeth in this film??? Either that was an ill-conceived look on the part of the makeup department, or he has become a meth-head since his last film. Whatever the case, it was distracting as hell.
• When did Matt Damon get so pudgy? He wasn’t outright fat, exactly, but man did he look big. What happened to that chiseled Jason Bourne look? He can obviously afford the best weight loss pill available, so why not use it??
• Kate Winslet’s character was a total waste. She was one of the best of the ensemble, so why have her make an inglorious exit so early on?
• The previews really should not have made this look like an action film. I thought Matt Damon was somehow going to run around and try to find the cure in the nick of time, but obviously that wasn’t the point of this movie at all. Yes, this was much more realistic in terms of how governments, the WHO, and the CDC would handle an actual pandemic, but it sure as hell made for a boring two hours.
• There was absolutely ZERO tension in this film. There wasn’t even a ticking bomb (so to speak), despite the fact that there was a deadly pandemic sweeping across the globe. No one seemed in a particular hurry to get anything done and there was NEVER a sense of urgency. What a waste.
• Because there were so many characters, I didn’t relate to or care about any of them. I thought Matt Damon was going to be the main guy, but that wasn’t really the case. If he had more significantly more screen time than anyone else, it didn’t feel like it. Plus, we knew he was immune from very early on. The rest of the film basically consisted of him staying in his house until his daughter could get the vaccine. Yawn.

Rating:

Even though I was expecting a different kind of film, I still resolved to give Contagion a fair shake due to all the great actors that appeared in it. However, not even the ensemble cast of Damon, Paltrow, Winslet, Law, Laurence Fishburne, Elliott Gould, Enrico Colantoni (aka Keith Mars), Bryan Cranston, and Marion Cotillard could sustain my interest through this snoozefest. I give the movie 2 stars out of 5.