Thursday, November 03, 2011

Contagion

Clare and myself saw this movie yesterday afternoon but I'm almost too bored to write any kind of review.

It's not that the film itself was boring; it was mildly absorbing all the way through. The problem is that an exponentially-spreading virus, for which a vaccine will eventually be found after a lot of deaths, is not intrinsically very interesting. So you have to overlay it with 'people stories'.

There were quite a few: the hero-doctor who uses his privileged knowledge to help a relative; the evil conspiracy-theorist blogger who makes his millions with fraudulent 'cures'; the heroine-doctor (pictured above) who catches the disease; the immune husband whose dead wife had a fling with an ex; the daughter who's sick of being cooped up by her dad; the hoodies who raid the supermarkets, break into houses and kill. It's a long list of over-familiar tropes and we're not really engaged.

I look forwards to the Elizabethan swagger of "Anonymous" soon enough.

My previous post about the Greek Colonels making a comeback seems increasingly prescient. The media are reluctant to dwell on it, but in the 21st century an advanced capitalist country in Western Europe can indeed fall off a cliff.