“It’s an Irwin Allen movie,” director Steven Soderbergh recently told the New York Times in a story about his horrifying new thriller, Contagion. “We’re doing exactly what he did, using a lot of movie stars and trying to scare a lot of people.” Soderbergh was referring to the Hollywood producer who gave us the monster hits The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). Allen didn’t really invent the disaster movie; that honor probably goes to Airport (1970), with Dean Martin trying to land a Boeing 707 that’s been crippled by a terrorist bombing. But Allen did perfect the survivalist formula that propelled many disaster movies (and countless horror movies since), in which an assortment of characters band together under the leadership of one shrewd and decisive individual to escape from an enclosed space before time runs out. Like murder victims in an Agatha Christie play, they’re picked off one by one, and part of the fun is predicting who will make it out alive and who won’t.
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The disaster movie has never really gone away, but certainly its heyday was the 1970s, an era so fraught with social and political chaos that the country often felt like a sinking ship or a burning skyscraper. Through the end of the decade, Hollywood cranked out one spectacular crisis after another: along with three Airport sequels there were Earthquake (1974), The Hindenburg (1975), Rollercoaster (1977), Avalanche (1978), Gray Lady Down (1978), Meteor (1979), and The China Syndrome (1979). Soderbergh’s movie arrives in a comparably bleak social climate, yet in some respects Contagion—about a worldwide pandemic that ultimately kills 26 million people—differs dramatically from the Irwin Allen formula. Instead of banding together to reach the outside world, Soderbergh’s characters pull away from each other in terror, sealing themselves up in their homes in a spooky mirror image of our atomized online society.
The everyman hero of the movie is Mitch Emhoff (Damon), who’s lucky enough to be naturally immune to the disease even though his wife (Paltrow) and little stepson die within hours of exposure. Mitch is a decent man, but he doesn’t have the chance to be Gene Hackman in The Poseidon Adventure or Paul Newman in The Towering Inferno; once he’s released from quarantine, he retreats with his teenage daughter to the safety of their home, like almost everyone else in the world, and waits it out. Many of the doctors at the Centers for Disease Control fall prey to selfishness or bureaucratic bickering. The only one who comes off particularly well is the selfless Dr. Mears (Winslet), who’s sent into the field to investigate and, perhaps inevitably, contracts the disease (she dies on a cot in a triage ward, characteristically trying to offer her jacket to the trembling man next to her). Meanwhile, the president of the United States has been moved safely underground, and members of Congress are staying at home and working online.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
