This is every germophobes biggest nightmare! And there’s nothing that a little hand sanitizer can do.
A rapidly growing airborne virus opens us on the gorgeous face of Gwenyth Paltrow’s character, flying through an airport in Hong Kong. She’s coughing and then she’s collapsing. Director Steve Soderbergh uses some brilliant technique that next give us the heebie jeebies. We see the touch our faces 3 to 5 x a minute, we see the public swipe of credit cards, subway station railings, wiping, holding, exchanging, sharing, sneezing and coughing. Suddenly it seems everybody’s got what she has. And then she’s found dead, and her husband Matt Damon, wants some answers.
Atlanta Georgia, center of Disease control is where Dr Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) oversees a team of doctors and scientists (and apparently OSCAR WINNERS) because Kate Winslet and Marion Cotillard are tracking it. Paltrow was in Hong Kong when she contracted it? Menanghitis? Flu? Smallpox? Bugbite? West Nile? Swine? Polio? The days tick away slower than the victims and you never know who its next victim will be. But the problem is aside from Matt Damon (widower) we don’t get enough time to care about these victims, so perhaps the film is angled on how a disaster of this magnitude might be handled.
Jude Law plays the role of a freelance blogger who seems to be onto a cure, and has won over the desperate masses via internet. The film administers levels of terror and fear in appropriate doses that build to a cure of desperation. The detail is very effective except when news announcements are made and the numbers are a bit off. Three tiaras