Contagion (2011)

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Posted By: brian@brianschell.com January 25, 2023

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

Imagine if COVID had been a much more serious disease. That’s how the events of this movie unfold with a very realistic outbreak, spread, and reactions. It’s well made with a powerhouse cast, and disturbingly entertaining. And… it’s from 2011, nearly a decade before COVID actually happened.

Synopsis

Beth Emhoff has a cough. She gets a phone call at the airport. A sick-looking kid in Hong Kong walks through a crowded city. We see various people around the globe getting sick, including one fatality. The sick people are on buses, elevators, crowds, and – you know how it goes.

The next day, at the CDC in Atlanta, Dr. Ellis Cheever goes to work and talks to an employee about his kid with ADHD. Alan Krumwiede is a journalist who wants to talk about these people getting sick.

Beth’s son gets sick at school; he caught it from his mother. His father, Mitch, has to go to school to pick him up. By the fourth day, Beth collapses and goes into convulsions; soon after, she dies. The doctor thinks it’s either encephalitis or meningitis, but he’s not sure. By the time Mitch gets home, his son has died as well.

The CDC starts gathering blood samples from Hong Kong, London, Tokyo, and other places. They know something’s up. Dr. Erin Mears arrives to help with the research. During Beth’s autopsy, they open up her skull and look at her brain. They find something shocking inside. They put Mitch into isolation, but he’s not showing any symptoms.

The government people argue about what to tell the public. This is the biggest shopping weekend of the year, after all. Homeland Security comes to see Dr. Cheever. They wonder if someone has weaponized the Bird Flu.

The guy who picked up Beth at the airport gets sick and infects a whole busload of people. The CDC learns that the disease originated in pigs and bats. Cue the “tracking down patient zero” montage. Dr. Sussman is ordered to shut down his research and let the government deal with it, but he doesn’t listen and learns how to grow the virus.

Dr. Mears decides that Mitch is probably immune to the virus and lets him go. The virus continues to spread, and by this time, everyone knows it. Dr. Mears gets sick and calls Cheever.

Dr. Orantes with the WHO is kidnapped in Hong Kong and taken to a small village as a hostage to get the vaccine that is rumored on the Internet. Cheever learns that mass transport of all kinds is shutting down and most people start working from home. Forsythia is said to be a cure, and that spreads around the Internet, but it doesn’t really work. Cheever tells his fiance to leave Chicago, and she tells a friend the “secret.” Before long, there’s a run on food at the grocery stores, and rioting starts. The borders are sealed.

Alan Krumwiede starts putting out fliers claiming that “The CDC Lies” and putting Forsythia promotions and conspiracy stuff on his video blog. There are mass graves, and the people burying bodies run out of body bags. Alan Krumwiede debates Cheever on the TV news, and the fact that Cheever told someone to leave Chicago comes back to bite him.

Then the virus mutates. The vaccine development process isn’t working. The fatality is between 25 and 30 percent. People can’t get food, and there’s more fighting and rioting.

Mitch starts breaking into dead neighbor’s abandoned houses looking for food. One doctor who has been working on a vaccine infects herself, and it seems to work, but it’ll take time to produce enough to stop the virus. Who will get the vaccine first?

Alan still insists that Forsythia works because he makes money from them, and now he’s trash-talking the vaccine. He’s arrested for a whole bunch of things but is soon released. There’s a lottery based on people’s birthdays deciding on who gets the vaccine soonest.

The men in Hong Kong release Dr. Orantes when they get a hundred doses of the vaccine. Turns out they gave the kidnappers placebos instead of the real thing. Dr. Cheever gives his fiance the vaccine but gives his own dose to one of the employee’s kids.

Things start to go back to normal, and we see a fruit bat fly into a pig pen. The pig winds up in a restaurant where Beth was eating. That’s how this all started– she was patient zero all along.

Commentary

This came out in 2011 and was a big hit. If this came out today, it’d be slammed for political reasons. We’ve heard all this stuff repeatedly over the past three years with COVID. Most of the way the film progresses is exactly like what happened with COVID, although it was a lot less fatal in real life. And the real world wasn’t the level of disaster in this movie. But for a “speculative” film, it’s awfully realistic in hindsight.

This was a horror movie twelve years ago, but the vast majority of it feels like history today.