Contagion is a movie centered on the threat posed by a deadly disease and an international team of doctors contracted by the CDC (Center for Disease Control) to deal with the outbreak.

 

It begins with Beth Emhoff in a Hong Kong airport returning home to Minneapolis from a business trip. A few scenes show a man with sickly features getting off a boat and goes home to his family, a model in London, also sick, who is found dead in her hotel room, and a business man on an airplane coming from the bathroom who’s not feeling well and while on his way home, convulses and dies on a bus.

Among the first casualties is Beth (later to be classified as Patient Zero – the initial carrier is showing extreme   physical symptoms of the pathogen. A few days later, she collapses on her kitchen floor and has several seizures. After being rushed to the hospital, she dies of an unknown cause. Within days, the pathogen is infecting seemingly everyone who’s been within touching, kissing, handshaking, dice-blowing distance of a carrier.

The movie also shows the rush to find a vaccine and the limitations put on people in trying to limit the spread of the vaccine as well as the mixing of infected and healthy population. It does a great job in showing how quickly social order deteriorates.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The film concludes by showing how the virus originated. Emhoff’s Minneapolis-based mining corporation is actively clearing jungle, and a bulldozer knocks over a palm tree in which bats were nesting. They fly out, and one bat lands on a banana plant, eating a chunk of banana. Not having its tree to return to, the bat flies to a nearby hog building, where it drops the banana into a pig sty, where a pig eats it. The pig is then sold and slaughtered and is shown being prepared by a chef in the Macau casino Beth Emhoff was in. The chef smears the pig’s blood on his apron but does not wash his hands before shaking Beth’s hand, thereby infecting her with the disease.

 

 

I found the first scenes to be crucial because they showed how much human-contact we have and serves as foreshadowing for the rest of the movie.