Has anyone else seen Contagion? (spoiler alert)

Miscellaneous Current Events
1

Aside from the obvious government propaganda, I thought it was a pretty good movie.

Things I liked about the woman:

  1. The lady who was kidnapped would have been okay that 100 other people wouldn’t have gotten the vaccine as long as she would have been released from her captives, but when she found out that the vaccines were actually placebos, she runs back to the village to save the kids.
  2. Deforestation caused all of this mess.
  3. Don’t shake hands with fat Chinese cooks because they don’t wash their hands after slaughtering a pig.
  4. Bloggers who point out Lawrence Fishbourne’s hypocrisy and that vaccines cause deaths and that the government is in bed with Big Pharma are fraudsters.
  5. Our benevolent leaders in chief deserve the vaccine first.
  6. We need one health policy because 50 policies are 49 too many.

Ironically, the movie shows that private industry (Elliot Gould (Dr. Sussman)) developed the initial vaccine because it had the special bat.

2

In my opinion, the movie was tedious and not worth watching. I’ve long felt that the most important thing a movie needs to do is develop the characters and really get to know their background and what makes them tick so that you care about what happens to them for the rest of the movie. Otherwise they die and you don’t care much because you don’t have any emotional investment in them. I didn’t feel like I got to know any of the characters like that. The plot meanders through too many characters and leaves bunches of character stories up in the air. Like the lady that runs back to save the kids. How does her being there save anyone?

I like movies like the last War of the Worlds where they make you afraid about all of the chaos and the breakdown of society. I didn’t get that fear at all. The blogger was walking around town like he was taking a Sunday stroll and even had time to pass out some flyers. Huh?

After plodding through a couple of hours of paint-by-numbers pandemic, I at least hoped for some sort of surprise at the end. But the end was as surprising and exciting as my last inoculation.