Contagion

Saw Contagion.  I added it to my list of films to watch during the first days of Covid.  It was made in 2011 but eerily echoes what we went through in reality.  The wonky terms "social distancing" and "R-naught" are brought up.  Bodies are tossed into mass graves dug hastily on public land.  It was most interesting to see how the film did and did not predict the future accurately.

The film has an all-star cast.  It tells little intertwining stories spread all over the globe and at all levels of government and medical science.  By bouncing between these stories, we get a sense of what's going on in the world and are also kept rushing along.  We don't get bogged down in the race for the cure but we also don't get too lost in the weeds of the average day-to-day.

The film interestingly overestimates our leadership and underestimates the general public.  Gangs of thugs are seen robbing houses and looting grocery stores.  The army is deployed and crowds of feral, shouting people swarmed them for food.  None of that happened in real life.  In real life there was a run on toilet paper that was left mostly to the groceries to deal with and the leadership, far from deploying the military, largely ignored the virus - saying it was overblown if it was brought up at all.

There's a truly despicable Alex Jones-type character who peddles snake oil to his internet followers and casts doubt upon the well-meaning powers that be.  That's spot on accurate, but I view that man as a kind of avatar of the internet as a whole.  In reality of course, our president was the one pushing a quack remedy (hydroxychloroquine,) and Covid denialism and a refusal to wear masks is now rampant.  The film did completely miss the economic upheaval and of course the quirky Zoom-centric socialization we all indulged in for a while.

The film is fairly chilling, really.  It ends with the virus being repulsed at last and there's some high drama involving the search for the cure, but the scenes that stick with you are the early ones, of a doctor from the CDC trying to set up quarantine only to be interrupted by squashy small-town leaders demanding to know who's going to pay for this, or the finger-pointing over the source of the virus, as though nationalistic face-saving were more important than human lives.  When it originally came out, I suppose the film was ultimately uplifting, but mid-pandemic as we are, it feels sort of comforting and sort of depressing.  Definitely an interesting viewing experience.