BEFORE: If I were looking to make a point about violence in films, I suppose I would have kept some kind of fatality counter going, but honestly that seems like a lot of work. But with the topic at hand, I count 6 on-screen deaths in the past week's films - and two funerals, plus one I attended in the real world. Tonight that number's on track to go much much higher. Just wait until I get into my serial-killer chain later this spring...
Linking from "The Sessions", John Hawkes carries over, which was my secondary reason for dropping that 2012 film into the chain.
THE PLOT: A thriller centered on the threat posed by a deadly disease and an international team of doctors contracted by the CDC to deal with the outbreak.
AFTER: I was shocked yesterday to learn how many people died of polio in epidemics in the early 1900's, but even that pales in comparison to flu pandemics, such as the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918-1920, which may have killed between 50 to 100 million people worldwide. The invention of commercial travel by steamship and then airplane sure didn't help keep these things contained. Nowadays, by the time "patient zero" is identified, he or she could have travelled to several cities or even continents before showing signs of disease.
The film opens on a close-up of a woman at an airport bar, and we see a bowl of complimentary peanuts. "A-ha!" I thought, since we all know those salty snack dishes are just breeding grounds for spreading bacteria - I mean, how often do they wash them? People go to the restroom, forget (or defiantly refuse) to wash their hands and then stick them RIGHT BACK into the nut bowl. Well, I was wrong about the peanuts, but the virus here does get transmitted through common objects. Watch the first few minutes of the film as the camera lingers on briefcases, subway poles, shared cell phones - the implication is that we touch all these things every day and don't even think about where they've been. Well, I do, I don't know about you.
How many times have I seen somebody on the subway cough into their hand, and then put it RIGHT BACK on the pole? Or a person in a restaurant making my food while wearing those little plastic gloves take a call on their cell phone? Well, they breathe on the phone, then they touch the phone with the gloves on, so the very thing that's meant to protect my food from their germs is now covered in them anyway. It just drives me crazy, and it's enough to keep me from going back to that sandwich shop for a while. Oh, but if I yell at the sandwich guy, or tell some straphanger to sneeze into their inner elbow instead, now I'm the bad guy.
As you can tell, I'm interested in the mechanics of it all, and this film really gets into it. An R-nought number describes how many people, on average, a person with a certain disease is likely to infect. For the flu, that number is about 1, and for smallpox it was 2. For polio, it was between 4 and 5. This number can be drastically reduced if sick people lessen their contact with others, wash their hands frequently, and - now this is key - STAY THE HELL HOME when they're sick, and don't ride the bus or subway right before I do.
Unfortunately, I found the narrative mechanics of the film somewhat lacking - there were story threads that were introduced and then never followed up on. Why was it so important to point out that one of the characters was having an affair in another city? Sure, the implication was that she may have spread the virus there, but why didn't we see it, or any of the fallout from the affair or the infection? Why bring it up and do exactly nothing with it?
The film has a loose structure, similar to "Babel" or "Traffic", in which we the audience see all the ways that the characters are connected, even if they don't. This allows several different kinds of stories to be told, but not all of them are resolved, or even followed up on. I can't tell if this is a failure inherent to the structure, or just a result of some odd editing choices. Well, at least all of the scenes are presented in proper linear order, with one notable exception.
NITPICK POINT: Several characters take to wearing surgical masks, or plastic-like cubes over their heads to prevent infection. But those only work if you wear them ALL the time. One character is then seen being interviewed on TV, and he's not wearing his improvised bio-suit. There's nothing particularly safe about the TV studio - if he believed that the suit worked, why take it off?
NITPICK POINT #2: The World Health Organization concentrates on identifying "Patient Zero" and the origin of the infection. Why? With millions infected and dying, and the social order collapsing, is this really the best use of their resources and time? Why not join the race to create and produce a vaccine, and figure out where it came from later?
Also starring Matt Damon (last heard in "Happy Feet Two"), Gwyneth Paltrow (last seen in "Running With Scissors"), Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "Searching for Bobby Fischer"), Jude Law (last seen in "All the King's Men"), Kate Winslet (ditto), Marion Cotillard (last seen in "Nine"), Bryan Cranston, Sanaa Lathan, Elliott Gould (last seen in "The Muppets Take Manhattan"), Demetri Martin.
RATING: 5 out of 10 petri dishes
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