the way this movie opens had me crying laughing, my stream of this movie completely lagged out at the explosion 💀Okay positives first, it’s a solid film, it has great acting from Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo. i really like the first half and its visual showing the spread of viruses. as someone who doesn’t like spit or anything saliva related, that movie theater sequence was unnecessary, cover your mouth man…BUT, it perfectly encapsulates how easy it is to spread illness, even inadvertently.
i like that the film doesn’t shy away from how terrible the government and military can be rather than the usual 90s glaze of said things, it does a pretty good job exemplifying how lot of those in power see civilians as necessary casualties, i love that sequence where they’re arguing about bombing the town an the one guy shows photos of infected and reminding these are the people they are willing to kill. feels extremely relevant now.
this movie is a slog to get through. an unnecessary amount of helicopter scenes it’s exhausting. scenes that feel like they’re looking around the room to come up with a way to pad out the runtime. The many conveniences in th story just feel so half-assed, everything the MC needs is essentially placed into his palm. The film also tries to be a million things, at first it attempts and succeeds at being a medical virus thriller but morphs into this military action by the end that again, felt like an excuse to have even more helicopter screen time. i also didn’t find the story to be all that impressive, its extremely standard with the familiar story beats of any film that follows a virus.
watch Pluribus instead, Contagion too.
every second Kevin Spacey was on screen, it was like a little piece of me died inside.
***that’s monkey knew what she was doing too. she was in it for the love of the game
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Warner Bros. Ranked ***
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