"Contagion" gets off to a pretty strong start, and after the first 15 minutes or so you're settling in for what looks to be a pretty exciting medical mystery-thriller type of story. Those first 15 minutes establish that a virulent virus is on the loose all over the world. It's obviously a mysterious virus and obviously a powerful one, and it's also obvious that once it's discovered no one has a clue what to do with it or how to bring it under control. That opening has the shocker of a mother-young son death, as Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow) brings the virus home after a business trip to Asia, and passes it on to her son Clark (Griffin Morrow). Both die quickly and suddenly and unpleasantly, and this movie seems to be on the way to a great ride. And then ... it fizzles.

After that very exciting start, it just fizzled. It tries to establish its credibility by often using too much medical jargon, which meant that there were a few things I never really understood, and there were extended scenes that had no dialogue at all. Usually this was for the purpose of giving us a sort of slide show of images of what was happening - crowd shots, illness shots, looting shots, etc. But you can only go so far with that and make it interesting. This isn't without value. It is interesting to see some of the strategies that probably would be used by officials faced with this kind of threat, and with repeated warnings in recent years of the likelihood of a global pandemic striking eventually, the movie has a sense of relevance to it. There's an interesting twist on the type of "conspiracy" angle you expect to see in this kind of film. Free-lance reporter Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) claims to have stumbled upon a cure that the government is deliberately holding back, but the twist comes when he himself is revealed to be out to profit on this epidemic. "Contagion" also features pretty decent performances from a solid cast (so you have people like Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet as well as Paltrow and Law playing prominent roles) but to me it lacked power. It wasn't a gripping medical thriller. It was a basically ho-hum medical mystery lacking in any real or sustained excitement. (3/10)