When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S., Steven Soderbergh’s (Ocean’s 11, Logan Lucky) Contagion (2011) shot to the top of the streaming charts. At the time, the CEO of Warner Brothers was going all in on their streaming service HBO Max, now just Max. The next guy, the much-maligned David Zazlov, continues to make choices that are more than questionable. So, it’s taken four years for someone in Warner Brothers to finally jump on the hottest business opportunity of March 2020 and re-release Contagion in 4K UHD Blu-ray. Congrats to whoever that Sisyphus of Pasadena is. The disc is way better than Warner-Brother Discovery’s “WB100” releases from last year, even if it shares that menu scheme. After experiencing four years of the COVID pandemic, how does Contagion hold up? Poorly.
Contagion’s cast is amazing; Matt Damon (Good Will Hunting, Air) plays husband to Gwenyth Paltrow (Iron Man, Shakespeare in Love) who dies of a mysterious disease after returning from a business trip to Hong Kong. Then, her sickness spreads, and the world falls down.
“Somewhere in the world, the wrong pig met the wrong bat.”
Laurence Fishburn (The Matrix, Boyz n The Hood) takes the role at the CDC that we saw held by Dr. Anthony Fauci in real life. Under him is Kate Winslet (Titanic, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) as a contact-tracing agent. Marion Cotillard (Inception, Taxi), first-billed for some reason, shows up on occasion as a World Health Organization (WHO) official, contributing almost nothing to the film in a plotline that probably should have been cut for nonsense and fearmongering. Jennifer Ehle (The King’s Speech, Saint Maud) plays a government research scientist with super vaccine powers, Elliot Gould (The Long Kiss Goodbye, Ocean’s 11) plays her academic counterpart, and Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad, Argyle) plays a military general. The rest of the film is full of oh-that-guys and what-was-she-ins. A great ensemble for an almost great movie. The last member of the cast, where the film has begun to age the poorest, is Jude Law (The Holiday, The Talented Mr. Ripley).
Jude Law, like John Bradley West (Game of Thrones) in Moonfall (2022), plays a conspiracy theorist who, in real life, is a monster who threatens lives and destabilizes society, but in the movies, is vindicated in their theory. Contagion tries to soften this mistake by having Krumwiede arrested for manslaughter and wire fraud, condemning this type of misinformation, and showing us the hard truth that his followers still bail him out. But, when taken in context with the film’s mystification and superpower-ifying of vaccines, the choice to give him any credit at all with the science of diseases, and ending with him free and espousing real anti-vaccine rhetoric, the damage is done. In real life, the Alan Krumwiede of the world have only been further lionized by their followers, moving the Overton window so successfully that real reporters dedicated to COVID-19 education and reporting are de-platformed and painted as conspiracy theorists (like Taylor Lorenz), for reminding us that COVID-19 isn’t actually over, and we’re still making policy decisions around it. It’s just become our policy to let people die or become disabled through constant re-exposure. Meanwhile, if he was real, Jude Law’s Alan Krumwiede would be making millions selling placebos to make your dick hard, and probably pivoting to questioning gender-transition science ala 1933 Nazi Germany.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I spent 2 hours arguing with a filmmaker housemate about which would make the more compelling film, the story of a cure or the story of survivors. I argued that it’s the lives impacted, the survivors bathed in grief, from whom the heart wants to hear.
We were both wrong out of naivete, because while Damon is certainly what Contagion thinks it’s heart will be, as the man whose horrific loss begins the film and grounds the tragedy, the all-too-short beating heart of it is Kate Winslet. Catharsis and truth are felt in the moments where Kate Winslet is asked “Who’s budget is this coming out of, yours or ours?” And in the fear that comes when you realize, with all your precautions, you’ve been got, and maybe you’ve gotten others, but you’ll never know — it’s in Winslet’s contact-tracing agent’s mystified wonder on how her precautions failed, even though we’ve seen her traveling and talking to others without a mask; it’s in Fishburn’s CDC physician’s rocking back and forth in his chair; and it’s in Damon’s husband’s inability to hold a traditional burial.
Watching Contagion, you might wonder why we see epidemiologists spend so much time walking around unmasked in the middle of a pandemic and spend so much time breathing airplane air once the death toll rises, but probably not. We know it’s true, this consistent lapse in judgment, because we’ve had it ourselves and seen it in others. One of the most touchingly tragic moments in the film is when, masks and all, one man in an airport drops something, and the person behind him breaks social distancing to pick it up for him. It’s the totally wrong thing to do, but done out of an impulsive kindness. It’s essential humanity on camera. Caring, but stupidly so.
The truth of pandemics is not in heroism and it’s not in loss, it’s in the unfeeling denialism of bureaucracy. Police, Congress, government agencies like the CDC, they are designed to preserve the status quo, not to save lives. The military never shut down cities in 2020, not because the Trump Administration actually believed in personal freedom, but because it was deemed too expensive. In the film and in real life, there is a misplaced, belligerent anger of bureaucracy and posterity aimed at scientists, which takes advantage of that uncritical streak in us, that compassionate voice that wants to spend time with loved ones, even if it kills them.
Contagion nails that feeling, yet its greatest failure is in the handling of vaccines. This is a pro-vaccine film, and it’s very clear that the film’s unfortunate handling of them stems from an attempt to make their efficiency out of the question. SPOILERS for anyone who hasn’t seen Contagion, but the climax of the film sees Jennifer Ehle’s scientist test a vaccine on herself, then seemingly immediately visit her dying, sick father unmasked and immune to the disease. And for the rest of the film, recipients of the vaccine seem to be treated as instantly immune upon injection, turning the drug into the most desired resource in the world.
This is not how vaccines work. No matter what the type of vaccine, the general principle is the same, an injection that teaches your immune system how to fight a disease, a process that has an incubation period, and a range of effectiveness based on each person’s immune system, and how many people around you have also taken it. The instant immunity portrayed in Contagion is a fundamental misunderstanding of vaccines, perpetuating the false idea that vaccines make you invulnerable, when instead they give you a fighting chance, and reduce your risk of severe illness or death. Vaccines are not a superpower, they only work to eradicate a disease when we come together in solidarity, adopting them en masse. And in real life we know, Americans are all out of solidarity.
There are many, many factors at hand in the rise of anti-vaccine sentiment and the under-adoption of the COVID-19 vaccine. Donald Trump’s presidency being built on a platform of science denialism is a huge one. The free-reign of the real-life Alan Krumwiedes like Ben Shapiro and Alex Jones, or all of Fox News, the most watched news entertainment agency in the country, which secretly required the vaccine for employees while questioning it every day at 5 p.m., being another. The groundwork was laid by the early-aughts anti-vaccine movement which captured Hollywood celebrities like Jim Carrey (The Mask, The Truman Show), and took advantage of the misplaced existential anger of parents whose children were born autistic. Yet, I cannot watch Contagion and push out of my mind that maybe seeing vaccines portrayed as instantly 100% effective at defeating a virus in your body sewed a seed in the public imagination that others would nefariously reap. As mentioned earlier, Contagion shot to the top of streaming charts at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a film with all these flaws in its science, which, if you watch the extras on this disc, markets itself on its scientific accuracy, endorsed by scientists.
Now-President Joe Biden ran on a platform of “building back better,” and recovering from this crisis with the help of science, and yet his policies began with the delivery of the MRNA vaccines, and ended with declaring the pandemic prematurely over and allowing his CDC to constantly contradict science by artificially shrinking quarantine periods to a day, and weaken masking protocols, just to appease rich CEOs. Hundreds of thousands more Americans have died as a result, and millions have suffered in other ways. Vaccines don’t make you immune. I only caught COVID after having received my vaccines, yet it was still so dangerous as to leave me with chronic keratitis in both eyes, groups of ulcers I have to constantly treat if I want to avoid permanently losing my eyesight. And that’s with the vaccine doing its job in my body. I’ve had dozens of people tell me they weren’t getting boosters, or the vaccine at all, because “They don’t even work.” If we had all adopted it at proper numbers, would the vaccine have been able to do its job in the community as well and lower the rate of cases? Would my eyes be fine? Would my friend’s father be alive? Would my immuno-compromised friends be able to leave their homes?
When watching Contagion, I cannot help but wonder about these questions and consider if the White House administration that passed an anti-AI executive order because it’s Commander in Chief watched Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (2023) and got spooked, would have had the idea, or the public cover, to pretend that vaccines gave you a magical immunity to disease, if we hadn’t all watched Contagion online in the spring of 2020?
What did Contagion get right? Nursing strikes, civil unrest, the refusal to not visit other people, that the few who were selfless would die forgotten by those who asked them to save us, and the demonization of those who dared allow their name to be attached to heroism. Tell your family you love them, Contagion looks good in 4K.
Available on 4K UHD Blu-ray and digital February 27th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official Warner Bros. Pictures Contagion webpage.
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