Monday, September 26, 2011

Contagion by Steven Gonzales



Contagion seemed to be a movie of epic proportions when I first saw the commercials on television. And it proved to be just that.

The movie follows in the footsteps of viral related movies of the past. The virus was not one that would ultimately turns its victims into the brain hungry Undead that we all love and adore, but a virus of absolute and unavoidable death.

The movie started out absolutely confusing because of its use of chronologically timed events, but in time it became more intriguing and caused me to worry less about how the virus started, but instead to become more focused on the people dropping like flies. No matter how annoying the people who sat behind us may have been, it was a very well explained movie and easy to follow.

Now, let me begin to go on about how devastating and amazing effects of the killer virus. The story follows after Matt Damon’s wife and stepson die suddenly around the same time that a video of a man, suddenly dropping to the floor of a bus and seizing before he died suddenly dropping to the floor of a bus and seizing before he died shortly afterwards, that had gone viral (no pun intended). I found Damon’s intense denial of their deaths to be quite humorous and extremely disturbing. I thoroughly expected him to cry like a baby after he learned about the deaths of his wife and stepson.

The autopsy of Damon’s wife was one of the more interesting parts of the movie because it raised several questions but it also showed how horrible the virus had become. The virus had an apparent ability to inflame and dematerialize the lining of the brain which caused a total homeostatic meltdown of the human body, destroying the lungs and brain which shut off all ability to live. The most notable effects of the virus are displayed by the speed at which it reproduces and the sheer number of deaths that it is responsible for. So many people are killed in fact, that one northern state completely runs out of body bags. It becomes a viral holocaust.

What the movie lacked in my opinion, was chaos. There was a considerable amount of destruction around the world, yet there wasn’t as much as one would imagine considering that a plague of death is roaming around every corner. There was indeed people roaming the streets killing, looting and breaking into buildings to obtain food and supplies. And as people would expect, the government shut down major cities and quarantined people and reserved supplies for the highest bidders, causing certain people to speak out against government officials and create mass propaganda.

Overall, the movie was how I expected it to be, and it was good. Matt Damon served a very small role in this movie however, and I believe that human beings would go far more insane than the movie portrayed. As well as the fact that the movie didn’t display enough infected cities to prove how devastating or how fast the virus was. I still found the movie to be very good and recommend that everyone go and see it.


B-

This review was written by Steven Gonzales, a correspondent for Makenzie's Movie Reviews

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