If you’ve ever sat in your room with the TV on CNN or BBC and seen a story about a small group of people dying of an infectious disease and immediately ran to your front door and locked it and refused to open it ever again, then this isn’t the film for you. The movie’s strength is that it plays so true to its idea. It proposed the idea of a world killing virus and rather than having those scenes, like the first NASA scene in Armageddon, where government puts its own self importance at the forefront of the film.

Contagion is a dramatic thriller about what would probably really happen when a completely unknown and highly contagious infectious disease is let loose in the world, just like when H1N1 was all over the place.

The film actually takes an interesting direction by opening on “Day 2” of the disease’s life. We continue throughout the runtime of the film without actually knowing how or where this thing started. We, like the people investigating, are left wondering where that start point is. While that is going on we continue to follow the search for a cure and the constant journalistic developments of all the theories of what the government is and isn’t doing to make this go away and keep it’s people safe.

The film’s scope spans not only about four different countries, while the most time is generally focussed on the United States’ response to the event, but also over five different protagonists all dealing with this development in their own way and unlike many films with multiple plot lines the film never short changes anyone while still having a runtime of less than two hours.

When the film begins you start believing that you’re going to be focussing on the character of Mitch (Matt Damon) after his wife, Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), returns from a trip to Hong Kong and dies of the disease, the suspected first person to have the disease. However, as the disease itself starts to spread and news develops we see the story shift to a much grander scale where we start to follow the development of treatment and containment protocols through the characters of Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) and Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), the investigation of the origins of the disease with Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard), the development of a cure with Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) and Dr. Ian Sussman (Elliot Gould), the journalistic opinion of the matter through blogger Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), as well as the government and military control of it all with Lyle Haggerty (Bryan Cranston). So to say this movie limits itself to the simple idea of a disease’s attempt to wipe out the world’s population is an over simplification of the thing.

This film is best in its big picture view. If we were to limit the scope of the film to just how Mitch’s family is affected we would be left wondering in a way that is best described as uninteresting. However, when you add in all these different elements it comes together like a great exposé. It’s the great piece on what would happen and when you leave the cinema at the end of the film you’ll be leaving with hands deep in your pockets and not talking to anyone in fear that you’ll catch a cold and that’s why I feel that this movie is possibly one of the best films of the year so far.

Rating: 9.0/10