CONTAGION (2011)

It's common knowledge that EBOLA SYNDROME is the greatest disease/virus outbreak movie of all time, but yet filmmakers still feel the need to try and defeat it...when will they ever learn?! [walks off shaking his handsome head]

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.

EVENT HORIZON (1997)

"This place is a tomb."

2047.  The "Event Horizon" is an experimental spacecraft that disappeared seven years ago and has now reappeared way the fuck out by Neptune. A distress signal was sent from the ship.  The film opens aboard a rescue vessel that is headed towards the Event Horizon. Along the way the crew is briefed (by Sam Neill, the creator of the Event Horizon) about how the ship was able to create an artificial black hole that would allow it to travel through a wormhole to a destination far away in just a fraction of the time it would have taken using traditional travel.  When the rescue crew arrives at the now ice cold Event Horizon, they discover that some sinister shenanigans are afoot.

I love outer space films like this, just the thought of being placed in a terrifying situation in such a remote, isolated location is an exciting premise for a movie (just look at ALIEN and THE THING), but EVENT HORIZON couldn't seal the deal.  When I first saw EVENT HORIZON back in 1997 it freaked me out.  Watching it again now though, I see it as a good example of a horror film that was so close to being awesome, but failed and ended up being just barely above average. The build up is fine, but then in the final act, everything just falls apart.  Instead of suspense and unbridled terror, it's just fizzles out.

It's still worth watching, because it is entertaining.  In the end I was more frustrated by what didn't happen than by what did.  According to IMDb the "original cut" is 130 minutes long. I have never seen that version available anywhere. The blu-ray I own is only 95 minutes.  I'd enjoy seeing a miniseries version of the story on something like HBO.  Sam Neill and Laurence Fishburne both give very good performances.

Director Paul W. S. Anderson went on to direct the blasphemous ALIEN VS. PREDATOR.

[Fun thought: If they ever release a fixed version of this film, they should use Front Line Assembly's "Synthetic Forms" as the main theme.]