New Release: 'Contagion'

In "Contagion" (Warner), Steven Soderbergh uses his camera lens as a kind of microscope to study the effects of a fictional pandemic. It's as much social anthropology as medical thriller, with familiar faces playing out the roles of victims, medical professionals and bystanders, and Soderbergh holding it all at arm's length, clinical and removed as he observes with a mix of technical detail and swift efficiency. He covers a lot of objective information and subjective experience in 106 minutes.

While Soderbergh favors clinical detachment to human engagement, he has the good sense to offer Matt Damon as our everyman point-of-view, a husband and father who loses his wife and one of his children in the first bloom of the contagion and becomes what would in other circumstances appear zealously overprotective of his surviving daughter.

The rest of the fine cast -- notably Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Jennifer Ehle, even Jude Law's maverick blogger (with questionable motives) -- are more defined by their purposefulness and focus. Damon is as close as we get to the human equation and that gives the film a queasy atmosphere so removed from the melodrama and spectacle of the traditional disaster movie. We don't feel like we "know" these characters and as a result we are more focused on the big picture -- the isolation of the virus, the search for a cure / vaccine, the survival of society -- than the survival of individuals.

"Less hysterical than hushed, more numbing than terrifying, "Contagion" is closer to documentary -- an imagined record of how global citizenry might realistically react to monumental crisis," writes MSN film critic Kat Murphy. "Though far from a likeable movie, "Contagion" is admirable as a highly controlled, verging-on-Kubrickia​n exercise in directorial vision and style. What's most disturbing about this low-energy disaster movie is how tellingly it taps into America's current angst, the fear of a slow decline that can't be cured"

The DVD comes with the two-minute featurette "Contagion: How a Virus Changes the World," a bouncy, witty little animated primer on viral infection and pandemics, plus an Ultraviolet digital copy, for download and instant streaming. The Blu-ray adds two addition, somewhat more substantial featurettes: "False Comfort Zones: The Reality of Contagion," which takes a more serious approach to the idea of contagion, and "The Contagion Detectives," which talks about the real-life CDC and WHO workers. There's also a Combo Pack with Blu-ray, DVD and Ultraviolet editions and all the supplements mentioned.

For more releases, see Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs and Blu-rays for January 3