Fascinatingly and again, plausibly frightening, political and corporate interest continually get in the way of the doctors' attempts to stop the disease, from the lawyer representing a mysterious magnate who offers Emhoff millions of dollars for a sample of his blood, to paranoid fears of terrorism from Homeland Security. But regular bureaucracy big and small causes natural obstacles as well from world leaders foolishly worrying about virus patents and the sharing of key information while thousands die, to the FedEx guy who innocently closes up shop early, failing to rush out the urgent CDC package that we later discover could have potentially saved hundreds of lives.
It's slightly less overtly Political, with an upper-case P, than, say "Traffic," in that there's no specific message being pushed, but it does land its blows nicely when it throws them — particularly at pharmaceutical companies, and the patenting of drugs and vaccines. Like "Syriana," however, there's a laudable global, geo-political context ingrained in the fissure of the story, showing the ways in which a tiny action can have enormous repercussions across the world. While expansive, and global "Contagion," doesn't forget the personal either and the script touches upon very humanistic situations all tied to the complex, interweaving story including infidelity, grief, and the terror of losing one's family that any one on the planet should be able to easily relate to.
The disease isn't some sci-fi super-plague; it only causes death in a certain percentage of those who come in contact with it, but it is enough to cause widespread mass panic and hysteria once word gets out. As we said above, the script's as much about the way that information and rumor can travel from person to person, and even the most well-meaning characters make bad decisions, even if it's only to protect their loved ones.
It's certainly a thriller in tone, and an extremely tense one at that, but anyone expecting "Outbreak"-style action sequences should look elsewhere; it's really more of a mystery, almost a detective story, as the various characters desperately search for the "index patient," and a vaccine for the virus. That said, some who've read the script, perhaps misled by loglines or the presence of 'Bourne' writer Scott Z. Burns, have lamented this lack of quote unquote "action," but this is missing the point — the propulsive momentum of the script provides equally intense white knuckle thrills of the purest kind, without resorting to car chases or men beating each other up with rolled up magazines.
The film is a race against time, the stakes are incredibly high throughout the film, and Burns' script never lets up — you're never allowed the opportunity to stop and catch your breath, which gives it a tight focus lacking in Stephen Gaghan's writing on "Traffic" and "Syriana." This isn't to say that there's a lack of texture or emotion to the film (the latter in particular is something that people often complain about in regards to Soderbergh's work); while its certainly procedural in tone, there are plenty of sequences of humanity sprinkled through the script that tethers the tale in the hear and now.
Damon and Law are pretty great too.
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