Contagion

When a new disease from China suddenly went really viral in the Special Administrative Region (SAR) of Hong Kong in 2003, the local government struggled vainly to get the global medical authorities to avoid naming it as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). Within a few years, bowing to inevitability, the SAR Government allowed Steven Soderbergh to do location filming for his mainstream docudrama about a similar fast-moving killer epidemic, Contagion (2011).

It shows that getting closer than ten feet to anyone, particularly shaking hands with a chef in Macau, can be lethal unless you're immune to or inoculated against an air-borne disease. The Everyman character represented blandly by lead actor Matt Damon is immune, which deprives the film's audience of any chance to care whether he lives or dies. Instead, it's more fun to note how the germ of a movie idea was mutated into a Hollywood product.

Scott Z.Burns, who wrote the screenplay, has also worked with Soderbergh on the remake of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2012) and the screen adaptation of the bio-doc The Informant! (2009). The latter starred Matt Damon, a frequent collaborator with Soderbergh. Damon and Burns knew each other too, from Burns' co-writing of the adaptation of The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). Damon contacted former co-star Jude Law (The Talented Mr Ripley) and other star names were lined up for life-or-death roles (Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Jennifer Ehle, and Elliott Gould survive; Kate Winslet and Gwyneth Paltrow die).

As the Oceans franchise showed, Soderbergh appears to create a happy-go-lucky mood on his sets, and such a working environment must be akin to R&R for the acting trade. Inevitably in a quilted disaster saga, characters are quick sketches with cliched words and expressions. Jude Law has the only juicy role, as the only truly despicable person in a world of noble disease control specialists. He sports awry teeth and a nagging Oz accent as a paranoid self-righteous anti-Establishment blogger who believes in, and profits from, a homeopathic cure (and it may be tempting for Wikileak's Julian Assange to consider a libel suit).

His Messianic impact is credible, unlike the Chinese colleague (played by a Singaporean actor) of researcher Cotillard who abducts her to obtain an advance order of inoculations for his home-village survivors. There's a bossy budget-conscious boss lady at FEMA, but no other American character comes close to nastiness, other than hundreds of extras playing panicky rioting plebs who get tired of queuing for emergency food supplies or jabs.

The movie's initially fast-paced, and a credit to its editing team and Soderbergh's camerawork, with each set of scenes marked by a numbered "Day". However, a film that starts with "Day 2" made this viewer fret that the projectionist (or distant digital finger) had lost "Day 1". It appears at the very end, to show how the disease started, but by then the sequence of field reports from Hong Kong, Macau and various American cities had slowed down so much that the scenario was creaking.

The procedural CSI-style disaster-thriller had become an increasingly tedious, dare one say lifeless, docudrama that had more documentation (and medical mumbo-jumbo) than drama. Several stars frothed at the mouth fetchingly (probably courtesy of Alka Seltzer, which deserved an end-credit), but the whole parade turned into a muddled and mealy-mouthed condemnation of human weaknesses.