Contagion is a propaganda film, designed to sell the following ideas

1. you should trust the government
2. you should not trust bloggers and others on the internet
3. unions are evil
4. China is evil
5. Chinese people are evil
6. the rich and powerful will take care of you in the end – they really care about you, even if they don’t look like it.
7. “conspiracy theorists” are actually in league with evil bankers to exploit you for their own benefit.
8. people should trust high-tech science over natural health remedies.
9. If you cheat on you husband, God will smite you down
10. If anything like the outbreak in this film ever happens, it won’t be that bad and everything will be okay in the end.

I don’t know how Soderberg and all these big-name actors got involved with this piece of trash. As dramatic art the film is a complete failure. It feels like a corporate-industrial film as it shows us all this scientific gadgetry and mumbo-jumbo as CDC studies the disease, devises a response, and works with the military to save us. I’m sure all the science was very accurate and well-researched, and I’m sure all those gun-toting soldiers look exactly like they would in real life, but dramatically the film is frightfully boring, almost like an educational film that might have been shown in high schools in the 1980s.

The human stories that decorate this central theme are ridiculous. Matt Damon is the guy who is immune – he sits in his house with his daughter the whole time, and they don’t even talk. Marion Cottilard’s only job is to “look really beautiful” so you’ll hate the Chinese people that kidnap her. Poor Kate Winslet is a loveless, emotionally disconnected functionary who croaks early and ignominiously. The story between Fishburn and the janitor was positively saccharine. At least Gwyneth Paltrow gets to make that “scary face” (see the preview or the movie poster if you don’t know what I’m talking about) while she is dying, but beyond that she’s just a cardboard placeholder, a person in a bunch of pictures that other people look at.

Plus, the story the film is selling to us just feels wrong, incomplete, as if it is intended to manipulate us. To give just one example, if this kind of disease ever took off our beloved financial markets would completely collapse, all over the world, as the super-rich who own 99% of the world liquidate their assets and depart for their private islands – not a peep about that one in this happy little film.

After taking in this bilge on opening night at the Union Square theater, my wife and I spent a long time trying to figure out what the deal was with this film, and how Soderberg (who after all made Erin Brockavich) would ever wind up responsible. We speculated that perhaps it was intended to be anti-Tea Party in some way, because if you have to point to one psycho-emotional theme in Contagion and say “this was the emotional core of the story,” it would have to be the plot involving the internet blogger who is telling everyone not to trust the government, and accusing the government and Big Pharma of suppressing evidence of a natural remedy to the disease. If this was its intention it failed epically, because the guy they got to play the internet blogger, Jude Law, is a fabulous actor who is also incredibly warm and likable, and he absolutely steals the show. Even after they unveil the completely unbelievable plot twist that this little nobody living in a garret in San Francisco is actively working with international hedge funds to corner the market on forsythia (puhleeze!) while he simultaneously misleads his millions of gullible readers by lying that the extract cured him of the disease, he is still emotionally compelling and believable and is still the only one you really like! They even gave him a crooked front tooth, just to make sure we all understand that this guy is “pure evil” – didn’t work, you still like him.

Contagion has a really good preview – don’t be taken in by it like I was. It makes the film look a lot like a better version of 28 Days Later, when in fact it can’t hold a candle to Danny Boyle’s dark and amazing film on the same basic topic. When you watch 28 Days Later, you are completely gripped with the human drama that unfolds as the disease spreads and society collapses. When you watch Contagion, you feel like you are being lectured to about how the government will save you and protect you from anything, if only you will stop reading the internet and stop thinking for yourself.

The only way anything positive can come of this film is if it succeeds in resurrecting Jennifer Ehle’s career. I’m sorry the only way she can get a role more significant than playing the three-line, pathetic, dying wife of some evil, murdering cop is by playing the geek scientist that saves us all in this stupidly manipulative film. But if it means that people will cast this elegant and magnificent actress in better material from this point on, then Contagion will have actually contributed something positive to human society.