Contagion - Life imitates art (nine years later)

A virus that starts off with bats in China, quickly spreads across the world causing mass death and destruction, not to mention 'social distancing.' No, that's not a brief history of 2020, but the plot of the film 'Contagion' made some nine years earlier.  Despite life imitating art quite scarily, luckily 2020 didn't have as many deaths as we can see on screen here - I guess we'll have to forgive Hollywood for upping the stakes a bit.

'Contagion' is quite a good little film, or at least it was at the time.  Now, it almost seems a little outdated as it shows us what COULD happen during a global pandemic, whereas today, we only really need to look out the window to see what the effects really are.  I guess it's main use now is to compare how the 'fictional' take on such a situation can be held up against real life.

On the plus side, it certainly has an A-list cast.  Ignore any promotional marketing regarding Gwyneth Paltrow - I don't really feel like it's a 'spoiler' to say that she's barely in it.  The main stars are Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet and some actress I'd never seen before!  Anyway, it's a decent cast, but because the story skips from place to place across the planet, most of these cast are only given a certain amount of screen time for us to get to know them.  Some of their plights are more interesting than others, so you sort of may find you want to skip some of their tales in favour of getting to the better ones.

However, due to such an excellent cast, you can't really fault anyone's performance, but if a film is going to tackle a story of such grand scale, I couldn't help but think 'Contagion' would work more if it was a ten-part TV series instead, as it suffers from being a bit of a 'whistle-stop' tale of what would happen in these trying times.

It's not a bad film.  It's was definitely entertaining for its time and, in some ways, it's turned from being a simple and entertaining 'what if?' scenario to a scary prediction of things to come where we - with the benefit of hindsight - can see what the script-writers got right and what they got wrong.

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that