Contagion Movie Essay

Superior Essays
Viruses; Who is the Beholder?
The greatest threat to humanity can’t be seen by the untrained eye. It could lay dormant for millions of years and evolve into the most terrifying form of itself. These infectious viruses create worldwide terror. The 2011 film Contagion by Steven Soderbergh does an incredible but also frightening job of revealing how a lethal virus would impact the Earth. The deadly virus started in nature, transported around the world through fomites and living creatures, and then the world reacted in positive and negative ways attempting to combat it. This three part series of actions is eerily similar to how an outbreak would unfold in reality and that is why the film was incredibly effective.
“A tentative earlier formulation noted that major infectious diseases of temperate zones seem to have arisen overwhelmingly in the Old World (Africa, Asia and Europe), often from diseases of Old World domestic animals,” (Wolfe). Infectious diseases in the real world as well as the movie usually start or lay dormant in nature until they are disturbed. In the last few minutes of Contagion they show how the disease started. “A final flashback occurs... One bat was infected with the virus. It grabbed a piece of banana and perched above a pig 's pen. It dropped the banana piece which we are to assume had the virus on it. A pig eats it and is eventually slaughtered at market for food. A chef handles the dead pig, touching the inside of the infected pig 's mouth with his bare hands. He goes out to dining room and poses in a picture with Beth holding hands, transferring the virus to her and starting the chain of events,” (Contagion (2011)). The ending portion of the synopsis is vital in relating the effectiveness of the movie to real everyday lives. Nature is the root of all evil in both the movie synopsis and the article by Wolfe, Dunavan, and Diamond. It is clear that the directors and writers of the film “did their homework” in the sense that their portrayed outbreak was utterly believable. “In fact, the movie 's fictional pandemic virus, MEV-1, is based on the very real Nipah virus, according to W. Ian Lipkin, an epidemiologist and virologist at Columbia University who was a lead technical consultant for the film,” (Zilinskas). According to Zilinskas, the Nipah virus also started with pigs and jumped to humans in Malaysia in 1999. The fact is that most infectious viruses have their origins in “Old World” parts of nature. Contagion just so happened to choose Asia for the birthplace of the virus. The directors of the film took known information about how viruses begin and utilized that knowledge to set forth the events that they believe would happen when the virus is released into society. According
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The movie does an incredible job with conveying all of the fomites to the audience by focusing on these inanimate objects as they come in contact with the virus. The screen actually stops and focuses on such things as poles on a subway train or a doorknob whenever someone infected with MEV-1 touches them. The animals fostered the virus, people contracted it, and then the people and fomites spread it the entire way around the world. “Both SARS and the fictional MEV-1 first emerged in a remote location in China, both were carried to Hong Kong by infected persons, and both spread globally from Hong Kong via air travelers. Further, both SARS and MEV-1 viruses are spread person-to-person via airborne droplets produced by sneezes or coughs, as well as by viruses deposited on "fomites",” (Zilinskas). In the movie and real life the viruses spread rapidly through many means with fomites and humans being the major transporters. Once again the film toppled the apocalypse style movie industry with their immense research and the result is a film that is scientifically accurate and terrifying to the unsuspecting audience. Without the audience doing research into infectious diseases and fomites, the degree of spread and high body count might seem outlandish and that of your typical zombie thriller. However, after seeing the facts behind the scenes, it proves that all of these pieces of the film are believable and a plausible apocalypse

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