Virus nothing to sneeze at in 'Contagion'

Near the beginning of the doomsday thriller "Contagion" comes a brief and harrowing image. It is a child, dead from an airborne virus, and his face is a horror: pouting lip, eyes wide with fear, a final, frozen expression of helplessness and accusation.

It's one of many ways "Contagion," directed by Steven Soderbergh, will try to immerse you in its frightening and very real-seeming scenario. The film imagines a fatal disease, MEV-1, decimating Earth's population and pushing civilization toward collapse. People expire before our eyes, but as the film moves methodically forward -- looting, robbery, riots -- it's the people who start to feel less and less important. As a result, "Contagion" will trigger your reflexes but won't do much for your heart.

The film opens with Gwyneth Paltrow as the coughing, sniffling Beth Emhoff, who has just cheated on her husband, Mitch (Matt Damon). That turns out badly for the other guy, and for nearly everyone around her. As the virus spreads, CDC staffers Cheever and Mears (Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet, both very fine) begin mapping out a public-response plan while the optimistic Dr. Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) works on a vaccine.

None of that adds up to a plot, so screenwriter Scott Z. Burns ("The Bourne Identity") throws in a kidnapped World Health Organization worker (Marion Cotillard) and an odd villain named Krumwiede (Jude Law), who boosts his blog traffic by spreading wild theories. They don't add to the narrative except to lengthen it.

Damon, as a man protecting what's left of his family, provides some moving moments. But "Contagion" focuses so much on what-ifs and what-nexts that it sometimes feels like a computer model. Soderbergh (the "Ocean's" movies) brings his usual palette of evocative colors and textures, but that's no substitute for warmth and emotion. Or perhaps, after the sight of that sorrowful little boy, there's only so much more we can feel.

PLOT A new airborne virus threatens to decimate Earth's population. RATING PG-13 (gruesome images, some violence, adult themes)

CAST Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, Gwyneth Paltrow

LENGTH 1:46

PLAYING AT Area theaters

BOTTOM LINE More about logical outcomes than real people, which makes this a convincing but sometimes clinical-feeling film.

Back story: Pandemic jangles director's nerves

The heroes of "Contagion" are the doctors and the agencies charged with preventing a real-life replica of the film's fictional virus. "Our exposure to the real people like this is strictly through television sound bites," director Steven Soderbergh said. "But that's the smallest and least interesting part of what they do."

Soderbergh said he was determined to avoid the usual mistakes and cliches of the genre: The science would be correct, and nameless hordes wouldn't succumb. "When you're making a movie about an issue this serious, inaccuracy and misinformation is not cool," Soderbergh said. "And the rule was we couldn't go anywhere that our characters haven't been. We can't go to Paris unless we have a character there. I don't want you to abstract the people who are dying -- to cut to people you didn't know."

While "Contagion" doesn't minimize the mortality of its pandemic, it's ultimately a hopeful tale of how people facing extreme peril rise to the challenge. But the filmmakers admit that they now look behind them when they hear someone cough.

"It made me nervous," Soderbergh said of making "Contagion." "Like Dr. Cheever says in the movie, 'We're due.' "

-- Los Angeles Times