Contagion Movie Review

“This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” So states T.S. Eliot in “The Hollow Man,” demonstrating that Mr. Eliot was not only a gifted writer but a fortune teller as well, predicting back in 1925 that our world will end just about now. The villain is not Iran or North Korea, not Venezuela or the Taliban, not Al Queda but…wait for director Steven Soderbergh reveals all in the final minute of his new disaster movie “Contagion.” We’re all fascinated by stories of the end of our planet, so long as the culmination of life is on the page of a book or an e-reader or the movie screen. First there was Noah’s Ark, then “Armageddon,” now “Contagion.” The trouble is that while there’s something almost comedic about how Noah’s animals lined up, two by two, always a male and a female however unhip that appears today, “Contagion” is without humor. While Michael Bay’s “Armaggedon” could center on a single asteroid the size of Texas heading for Earth, the source of obvious tension as to where it would land, “Contagion,” which takes place around the world and has Peter Andrews’s camera zipping around everywhere from Hong Kong to Tokyo to Minneapolis, is too diffuse to carry much tautness. There you have it: a film without humor, without tension, but with an all-star cast that the studio hopes will draw in the crowds.

As Soderbergh imitates the six o’clock news, largely foreign but mostly home grown here in the U.S., we watch how a virus spreads from one person-from the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow of all people-to twelve million. Paltrow’s character, Beth Emhoff, is married to Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon), but finds herself in Hong Kong sans her husband, having a good time after hearing from a fellow with whom she spent a night at a hotel. But adultery has its punishments: Beth is the first to die, breaking out in a cold sweat, soon winding up examined in a autopsy which spares us in the audience the closeup of her brain but gives us enough of a hint of gore by showing the surgeon peeling back the top of her head. That’s just day 2 of the outbreak: Scott Z. Burns’s script saves day 1 for the final minute.

“Contagion” plays not like a solid narrative, but then not all movies need to use that format. “Traffic” did quite well scurrying about, for example. But “Contagion” comes across throughout like a news broadcast, with all the news from all parts of the world just about the same. A few characters propel the story forward. Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) is the most rock-steady individual, spewing alarm by phone and behind lecterns as number one man at the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard-whom I expect to burst forth with “La vie en rose) serves this time as World Health Organization bigwig, kidnapped for a ransom of vaccine. Elliott Gould furthers his career as one of many scientists groping for a cure, while Kate Winslet as Dr. Erin Mears pushes for a quarantine. Strangest of all, Jude Law operates as freelance journalist Alan Krumwiede, telling us not to believe in what the government is propagating while trying to enrich himself with a fake homeopathic cure for the disease called forsythia.

The obligatory riots break out when crowds hear that the vaccine is available but is being given to government favorites. Looting and murder takes place with the breakdown of society. Ultimately “Contagion” is flawed by its absence of edge-of-seat-disaster tension, its major plus being that the movie is not shown in 3-D.

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Review: 'Apollo 18' — The Moon's Livelier Than You Think

Ever wonder why no humans have stomped their boots on the moon in nearly 40 years? Well, if you believe the pundits, the answer's simple: Once the race to beat the Soviets to our crater-studded satellite was over, the political will to return (which is to say, the money) evaporated as quickly as tears on a hot griddle.

But that's the official story. And there are a lot of red-blooded Americans who make it their life's work to deride official stories. Now Hollywood is catering to the conspiracy cultists by revealing a hideous secret concerning NASA's Apollo program.

In the latest entry, the new film "Apollo 18" directed by Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego, the secret isn't that we faked the lunar landings, although that beyond-bonkers idea is believed by roughly 15 percent of the populace. No, it's that we landed there one time too many! [Top 10 Apollo Hoax Theories]

The ingenious premise of "Apollo 18" (which opened Sept. 2) is that in 1974, shortly after the Apollo program had been cancelled, the space agency sent a trio of astronauts on a clandestine mission to the moon’s south pole. Their ostensible brief was to set up some military radar equipment. The actual purpose was to check out some strange happenings involving alien presence.

The guinea pig astronauts were literally flying blind, as they weren't told about the real reason for their lunar jaunt. Indeed, the fact that they had been sent to the moon at all was kept secret from their families, from the public, and — it seems — from tens of thousands of NASA employees. You might think that this last group, at least, would have a "need to know."

But as the opening credits announce, now all of us can "know" what happened on this incognito foray, thanks to historical footage recently made public and niftily edited together into a feature-length entertainment. [Interview: 'Apollo 18's' Real-Life Flight Director]

The movie maintains this clever storytelling artifice with a visual style that mimics video and 16mm film footage throughout, nearly all of it hand-held and relentlessly festooned with scratches, light streaks, sync dropouts, and gate dirt — all calculated to provide that extra dollop of authenticity. Your dad's old home movies are in better condition.

"Apollo 18" is, at root, a haunted house story, in which a small group of basically nice people — temporarily isolated from the outside world — are confronted with cryptic horrors. The aliens who ruin the astronauts' whole day and whole stay are crabby in every respect, and are particularly adept at wreaking havoc at inopportune moments.

Mind you, even aside from the obvious question of how this species of crater creatures survives on the moon (What do they breathe? More than that, what do they eat?), there's always the question of motive. Why are they there and what’s their game plan?

It doesn’t matter. This film is a combo platter of "Alien" and "Blair Witch Project," both of which could be faulted on logic, but neither of which could be accused of taking your ticket money without delivering the goods.

"Apollo 18” will keep you riveted to your seat (except for those moments when it causes you to rise out of it), even if it does little to further your understanding of planetology or astrobiology. This trip into space is not the friendly, final frontier of "Star Trek," but a tale of horror in which help is a quarter-million miles away.

But there's one thing that's got me wondering. Do you think they made this picture using the same movie set used to fake the moon landings four decades ago? Nah.

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Movie Review: Shark Night 3D Bites, and Not in a Good Way

Hot coeds and a lake full of hungry sharks, all popping out at ya in 3-D should be an easy win. We loved last year's awesome Piranha 3D, and really wanted this movie to have bite. Something's off though, since it's really not a picture about sharks going all Jaws on its victims at all. Nope, this Night is more about the haves versus the have-nots which in our recession era could be interesting, but it's so not. Plus, with a PG-13 rating, the shark attacks are mostly botched in dark, dim 3-D waters.

The Bigger Picture: Louisiana native Sara (Sara Paxon) wants to show her city classmates a good time with a weekend of fun in the sun. So she's invited them all to stay at her family's island paradise on the lake. Four dudes, three gals. At first, the only pesky thing is no cell phone reception. But things get way worse when star football player Malik (Sinqua Walls) gets his arm torn off...by a shark. Shortly after that, a shark takes a bigger chunk out of his girlfriend Maya (Alyssa Diaz).

A shark? In a lake? How is that even possible? Do you even care? Well, even if you don't, the script is going to stop dead in its tracks to explain it all. And then stop again, to show that the real villains are hillbilly stereotypes.They even named one of them Red, as in redneck. His teeth are razor sharp...like a shark!

If the "poor rednecks are evil" storyline was played for laughs we could have forgiven having to sit though the Southern baddies angle, but it makes the tone of the film mean-spirited and ugly. Idol's McPhee is as sexy as you'd imagine, but having her strip down to her underwear at gun point doesn't feel dramatic, just exploitive.

Ya see, Shark Night 3D is less a horror film—the suspense barely comes from the sharks—and more a made-for-TV drama about Sara's old friends terrorizing her new ones.

Which is strange, because director David R. Ellis has been a great fit for the kind of trashy fun that you'd think a film titled Shark Night would have been. (He's made not one but two Final Destinations.) Maybe that's because the PG-13 rating robs Ellis of his gift for shooting crazed but entertaining kills.

Still, the cast is uniformly solid. Paxon is a sympathetic girl-next-door and the southern baddies convince. Clearly, Ellis was going for something more than just a dumb dead teenager film. He deserved a script that didn't play like warmed-over Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

The 180—a Second Opinion: Donal Logue does what he can as the local sheriff on the lake. Even a part below his talents still manages to give him a few fun scenes as the leader of more than just the local law.

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