CONTAGION opens with Gwyneth Paltrow looking more haggard than usual as she leaves China and returns to her family in Minnesota. Before long she collapses and dies. Her young son also dies. MEV-1 has made it to America. You would expect what follows to be a very exciting story of the vrus spreading and humankind's efforts to stop it. That actually is the story, but it's methodical and dull. I wanted so much to like this movie because I love outbreak films, but CONTAGION is a lifeless disaster. There's absolutely zero build-up so you never even have a chance to identify or like the characters and there's so many characters all running around different parts of the world doing different things it's difficult to even figure out what the movie is even going for...if anything! Because it certainly wasn't "To entertain audience."
The trailer did look exciting, but what's implied is not what happens. Instead of an exciting race-against-the-clock thriller with a roller coaster pace, we get a slow moving clunker with the pace of an 96-year-old man masturbating to an IKEA catalog. If the transmission rate of MEV-1 was as slow as this movie, then nobody would have died...ever! Plenty of talent on the screen, but it's all wasted by the slow as molasses script and weak direction. Skip it.
Sounds like that old South Park episode.