Right up front I’ll tell you that I liked this movie. It starts out with a woman who’s getting back from a trip over seas and shows how she gets sick and dies. (That’s not too much of a spoiler.) The CDC attempts to track where it came from and how it got there amid various obstacles.
From an entertainment standpoint the movie is good because it has some good dialog and I found the characters believable. There’s one great quote in there about bloggers not being writers, but grafitti artists or some such that made me laugh out loud. There’s some good star power as well such as Matt Damon, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne and others. Even though I don’t follow the antics of the various actors (or the Kardashians) I did know most of the names of the people appearing in this movie.
From a SHTF view the movie does a good job of showing how there could be a social breakdown when something like this comes along. Stores are emptied out, houses are looted, food distribution is chaotic and not well organized by the people handing it out, quarantines are put in place on major cities, and so forth. I don’t want to ruin it for those who haven’t seen it yet, but I think it’s worth seeing.
Disclaimer: It doesn’t take much for a movie to entertain me. I’ve watched movies that critics hated and I thought to myself, “That was an awesome flick!”
Have you seen this movie? What did you think? What other SHTF movies have you enjoyed lately?
-Jarhead Survivor
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{ 23 comments }
Contagion was too predictable. *SPOILER ALERT* The one thing I did learn was when they were in the grocery store and that old lady whipped around the corner and was coughing all over the place. Matt Damon’s character told his daughter to back up and not touch anything. Therefore if/when SHTF happens and you have to enter buildings, I’m going to wear disposable gloves in case I have to pick up anything potentially contaminated. (And have some ways to sanitize the outside of cans/boxes afterwards.)
We saw it and enjoyed it as well. The ending was predictable, but I guess the producers did not want to scare sheeple TOO much. 8^)
I was excited to see this movie because of the star power. I found it to be nothing but a huge pro-government advertisement for vaccines. In a time when people are beginning to question the safety of vaccines, this movie conveniently answers the question by showing them to be the absolute savior of the situation. The one guy promoting an alternative to the vaccine was portrayed as a lying fraud. I walked out of the movie mad.
That is a good point & a concern of mine – selling the seed of deception. How many people would really get that a underlying belief is actually being sold? That planted thought is the basis for mass panic.
It reminds me of the scene from Close Encounters of a Third Kind where the animals were found dead in the field & the men with the white suits & breathing gear were ushering people away. Richard Dreyfuss & Melinda Dillon discover is was a bunch of crap & an effort to move people away from the close encounter which, “they” wanted to control.
I always say – believing is seeing.
“The Constant Gardner” is a great movie depicting that ugly & false pharmaceutical angle. Also, “The Insider” is an excellent, true story about the trillion dollar tobacco industry & how they care only about profit.
Although vaccines are the target of a lot of tin foil hate paranoia, they are an indispensable part of modern health care.
They work, they work well, and the reason most people in the first world live so long is because of basic vaccination and sanitation, not the modern cancer treatments that cost half-a-million dollars to keep you alive another 8 months. The real conspiracy theory is that virtually all of our health care is spent in the last 6 months before someone dies.
People who have actually practiced survivalism for real (i.e. traveled extensively to the developing world, served in the military, etc.) understand just how frighting infectious disease is in real life. Vaccines have astronomically small risks, and they save lives.
Is it possible that the government might put something harmful in vaccines? Sure. However, it is possible that the government could put something in your food, your water, or be crop-dusting your air. A government that has the power to create a giant conspiracy to put shit in vaccines can put shit in anything it wants. In fact, maybe part of the plan is for a supervirus is to kill off all the paranoid types that refuse vaccinations while saving the lives of the obedient citizens. Once you start delving into hysteria and paranoia, there isn’t any way to win.
As for the people talking about it all being a money making conspiracy by big pharma… that is bullshit. Big pharma would much rather you be hospitalized at $1000 for 2+ weeks for pneumonia, than to make a lousy $2 for a flu shot.
Smart survivalists will have their rabies vaccination, tetanus, hepatitis, and all that stuff now. I get every vaccination I can possibly get. My vaccinations will be way better than your colloidal silver or overpriced herbal vitamin supplements.
Pile driver,
Strange comment (dig). Where did you ever get the impression that I was imprudent? There is plenty of modern medical discoveries that mitigate disease, infection & prolong life, that wasn’t the issue. I was addressing how trusting people can be if someone of “authority” says it’s so.
Conspiracy? Big Pharmaceutical profits at the expense of human lives is well proven & a foregone conclusion a few decades ago, similar to how taxpayers have bailed out the privately held banks for many, many decades.
Maybe you really believed that Obama represented real change … Here’s a guy who, with near zero experience yet, gets elected President of the United States. How was that possible? It defies all logic & reason.
(Answer hint – deception).
Jarhead, you said something very important:
Disclaimer: It doesn’t take much for a movie to entertain me. I’ve watched movies that critics hated and I thought to myself, “That was an awesome flick!”
Most movies by enlarge & design are made to entertain or they are called a documentary. First & foremost I go into a movie theater to be entertained, nothing less & watch from that perspective. Quite often I do not agree with the critics because they are being ….. a critic.
The ONLY critic to consider is yourself & if you liked the movie, that’s great!
BTW, most movie reviewers couldn’t make it in the entertainment world so they sit on the sidelines & pass judgement.
Aye that ! I go to be entertained ….period . Last thing I want to do is think , if the audience doesnt get it , the movie failed . I do like a little historical fact in the mix to make it interesting . Period pieces are my fav .
gloves and surgical masks only make sense in a hospital environment where you have a sick person isolated and the rest of the hospital is “clean”. The thing about a highly contagious disease is that it is highly contagious! You WILL be exposed to it and your fate will be determined by things like your genetics, age, health, prior illnesses, luck, etc. You will not be able to simply use a alcohol based hand cleaner and avoid a highly contagious disease. It will make you feel better, much like pushing the buttons on the elevator while waiting for the door to close but it won’t help. This is the one thing that most bothers me about these movies that they give this false hope that if you just wash your hands and wear a mask you can avoid the disease while all those around you die.
Really we have learned alot about highly contagious diseases over the years and the one thing we do know works is isolation and social distancing. The only sure way is to not come in contact with a carrier.
You are absolutely correct. If you have a single patient in a hospital environment with a known communicable disease then what you describe works great. If on the other hand you have a million or a hundred million with a much more communicable disease and you cannot tell who has it then what you described is simply whistling past the graveyard. And right there is the difference between a “disease” and a pandemic. The very thing that makes it a pandemic makes the efforts you describe next to useless.
I thought the movie was interesting and accurate from the point of view of epidemiology. The point of the movie seems to be that we are all interconnected and the danger of epidemic that this causes…
That be said the movie frustrated me from a SHTF point of view. Its biggest problems:
1) Government saves the day… typical statist propaganda, perhaps in such a situation the government may save the day, but it is probably more likely to lie to you and make the situation worse, all the while looking out for the best interests of the bureaucrats.
2) As far a a vaccine being developed, no matter what you think about vaccines, they don’t just pop up out of thin air. They take considerable time and it seemed far fetched how quickly the vaccine was developed. Most estimates are 6 months to a year for a new strain of flu, a completely new virus would take even longer than that. Patient on gave the bug to a dozen people before succumbing in less than a week. Six months in huge percentages of the populace would be dead, no one would be going to work, services would break down and the grid would fail.
3) Although the epidemiology seemed fairly accurate the ramifications seemed unrealistic. There was food in the stores… who got it there? And the power kept running…who was maintaining it? Cars seem to be running suggest fuelwas being supplied and there was no suggestion that clean water was an issue…it just all seemed too neat. On the streets, though they did show trash piling up, there didn’t seem to be any real civil disturbance, not riots or looting or anything despite the fact that there weren’t many cops around.
Actually, out of all the SHTF scenarios, looters and riots seems least likely with contagious disease. Most people will want to minimize contact with other people.
People will still need to eat after they have run out of food!
There will be riots in any situation as soon as a living person or family realizes they do not have what they need to survive.
agree… With that kind of infection / mortality rate, they will also feel like CRAP!
personally I’m most worried about the first few week… when all of us debt-wage slaves take a Halls and get on the bus to work…
sorry, but agree with Veridical I mean…
Yeah, at some point survivors will go looking for food in the drugstore… but by then any “rioting mobs” will have gotten a lot less numerous… and they still won’t exactly be full of pep.
Another movie l seen that was very good as far as showing the panic was called “Blindness” Gives you another prospective of what can happen with a contagion.
I forgot another movie this is similar to – “Outbreak” with Dustin Hoffman, Cuba Gooding Jr, Rene Russo & Morgan Freeman. It’s a semi oldie but a goodie!
+1 for Outbreak also it had Donald Sutherland in it
How in the world did I forget him???!!!!
He was my favorite in the original M*A*S*H movie.
Generally I liked the “Contagion” movie – but as Padre pointed out, they REALLY had a plothole in terms of how such a population sickness & crash would affect day-to-day functioning of a city … throughout the movie, the low-level employees kept coming in, apparently, since things ran smoothly… it was only the “professionals” (the stars) who got sick & died.
Though in my favorite movie “Children of Men”, it takes forever for people to realize / acknowledge that something is wrong – but they still keep doing unproductive things, like coming to work (at half-empty cubicles), because, well, that’s “normal”.
[Side note - there were sailing ships that spent months at sea and
everyone survived the voyage healthy - only to die when they arrived at a "civilized" port. The residents were healthy too - but the sailors lacked immunity (especially any children on board). So the "I'll just lock myself up till it's over" plan isn't necessarily gonna save you.]
Everlasting fire ay, i straits inscribe a portio somebody enjoy this limit didnt regard life, may i repost this Movie Survey “Contagion&rdquo
Contagion was absolutely a pile of “Hot Garbage” in no way, shape or form of the so-called “All Star Cast” could have saved this film from the lack of reality that Sonneberg and his pathetic excuse for Federal Cooperation in the making of the film. In any fast acting epidemic especially in the OCED (Read “First World”) Nations, the thin veneer that separates the civilized from the savage will quickly come off, revealing the nasty human animal that all the unprepared will succumb to. But again Sonneberg wanted his Federal Cooperation and by golly he got it in spades, too bad, so sad, because this film had the star power to go the distance in telling a tale of modern globalization gone amok, with John and Jane Q. Taxpayer being the ultimate victims. Well at least King got it right with the Stand, not withstanding the spiritual implications, and that was television, not film. Too bad that all big budget disaster films by the oversized cinema conglomerates have to have their cake and eat it too, because it would be nice (Like the Road with Vigo Mortensen) where the big bad government doesn’t win and where the center of the piece has you questioning why one continues to take society’s never-ending stream of crap sandwiches…