Contagion

I've been a fan of Steven Soderbergh since, wow, since Out of Sight came out, which was when I was 15 or 16, right at the onset of my burgeoning deeper interest in filmmaking. I would even go so far as saying Soderbergh played some part in my deeper interest. I haven't seen all of his films, but I've seen many of them, and with the exception of maybe the Ocean's sequels, they've all been good (and even the Ocean's sequels have their share of moments). I guess I'm saying all this to illustrate that I know I'm in good hands when a Steven Soderbergh film comes out, and that sentiment again proved true with Contagion.

Contagion is much like his Oscar-winning epic Traffic, in that, instead of a single straight narrative, it follows several characters from around the globe, tracking the progress of a fast-spreading new virus as it tears its way across the world. Unlike Traffic, though, Contagion plays more as a thriller or even a Chrichton-esque horror movie. It never goes too far into the realm of science fiction, keeping the situation grounded enough in reality to be believable and genuinely scary.

Matt Damon plays the relatable human side of the movie, as a man whose family are among the first victims of the virus, trying to protect his daughter from sickness and all the other dangers that could come from a world ravaged by plague. He's good as always, I really can't think of anything bad to say about Matt Damon in anything, especially his work of the last five years or so.

Contagion also stars Laurence Fishburne as the head of the CDC, Jennifer Ehle as a CDC researcher working on a cure, Kate Winslet as an epidemiologist searching for the origin of the virus, Marion Cotillard as a World Health Org. investigator, and Jude Law as a corrupt blogger, profiting from the panic he's helping stir up. Many other good actors appear in smaller roles, too, such as Gwyneth Paltrow, John Hawkes, Bryan Cranston, Enrico Colantoni, and so on.

Soderbergh and the writer, Scott Z. Burns, clearly did a lot of work to show how an outbreak might actually spread and what might happen as we race to find the cure. It takes place over a pretty long period of time, since it wouldn't be realistic for a cure to be found and distributed overnight. I'm pretty sure they used the recent Swine Flu epidemic as their jumping-off point. Soderbergh uses some extremely cool editing to show the virus' progress via montage. The montage stuff was probably my favorite stuff in the movie.

So Contagion is totally worth checking out. Steven Soderbergh once again proves himself a capable and versatile director. I think he's made movies in almost every single genre by now. Besides, with all this talk of him retiring in the next couple years to become a painter, we should try to enjoy Soderbergh in theaters while we can.