Contagion doesn't mess around

Contagion (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Starring Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law.

Ambitious viral epidemic disaster movie starring every actor you've ever heard of.

An American businesswoman (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns from Hong Kong with a deadly new virus, beginning a global outbreak. Contagion follows the stories of those in the middle of it, including CDC scientists (Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Jennifer Ehle), the widower of patient zero (Matt Damon), and a really annoying blogger (Jude Law).

You know a virus means business when it kills Gwyneth Paltrow in the first ten minutes. Her death and the death of her young son moments later make it clear that this movie isn't going to play softball to service its viewers' feelings and expectations. It's about as sympathetic as a real virus would be.

The film is realistic, too, about the true dangers of a global pandemic. The pathogen isn't the usual movie super-virus that shoots between people like a laser beam and kills with 100 percent success. It spreads only by touch and has about a 25 percent death rate.

But as Contagion illustrates, that's plenty. This is not a thriller about the potential extinction of the human race, but about the social consequences of a serious viral epidemic. It covers the breakdown of authority, the desperate search for placebos, the looting and violence, and the profiteering: all the things that past generations have dealt with in these scenarios, but which we've never seen in the context of modern society.

The film is also unusually respectful of science-a pleasant break from the usual warning tale about scientists playing God ("Oh, what a fool I was to imagine I could invent a better waffle maker without it turning all my children into waffles!").

With its wide scope and expendable characters, Contagion sometimes lacks a strong personal core for viewers to connect with. But it's a fair tradeoff for the sheer amount of ground the story covers-its thoroughness, insight, and level-headedness.

Rated PG-13 for everybody dying.
4 out of 5

Apollo 18 (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Gonzalo López-Gallego. Starring Warren Christie, Ryan Robbins, Ali Liebert.

Low-budget horror film with an interesting concept but a dull execution.

Presented as an edited version of footage leaked from a top-secret final Apollo mission in the 1970s, Apollo 18 is the story of a team of astronauts who visit the moon's south pole, find terrors lurking in its craters, and are kind enough to document every moment of their grisly deaths for us on camera.

Shot mostly with grainy stationary cameras, Apollo 18's worn look shows commitment to the illusion and nicely complements the sense of vulnerability and isolation invited by the premise. There is no music, and most of the sounds we hear are distorted radio conversation and noise. The pacing is slow. Apollo 18 is reasonably creepy.

Unfortunately, it's not very scary. The movie is about moon monsters, to begin with, which makes things moderately silly right off the bat. These are humdrum spidery bugs that have somehow evolved a parasitic relationship with humans-creatures they have encountered approximately six times in the last 4.5 billion years. That's a hell of an ecological niche.

And even at barely more than an hour and 15 minutes, the film drags. It shows all of its tricks early, then continues to rely on them too much and for too long. Crawly movements in the background are creepy only until we are given a good idea of what the monsters are. Creepy noises over the radio add tension in small doses early on, but not when they're a constant din throughout the film. In a movie set in the quietest and most remote environment ever visited, more use of eerie silence would have gone a long way.

The story's sense of hopelessness adds to the tedium. The two main characters spend most of their screen time in a damaged lander 400,000 kilometers from help, alone with hostile creatures who can breathe vacuum and possibly pass through solid matter. To be suspenseful, a horror movie's characters need to have a fighting chance-otherwise it's just an elaborate snuff film.

The government plots and conspiracy theories that frame the story come off as half-baked even by the standards of this fictional universe.

Not unwatchable, but not recommended.
Rated PG-13 for OSHA violations.
2.5 out of 5