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Locally shot 'Contagion' infected by generic characters

You hear a cough and it sounds like a gun being fired.

You stop touching your face, as you often do thousands of times a day.

You avoid grabbing door knobs and railings on buses and trains.

You even wear surgical gloves and face masks.

These are a few of the likely consequences of watching Steven Soderbergh's taut new drama "Contagion," a killer disease thriller that starts out oozing viral paranoia before it slides into a tepid anticlimax.

The story begins with a single woman feeling sick after a business trip. More than an hour into the movie, an estimated 26 million people around the globe die from an epidemic caused by a mysterious disease for which no cure exists.

"Contagion" - partially shot in Elgin and other suburbs - appears to be modeled after those classic, star-studded disaster movies from the 1970s: "Towering Inferno," "Airport," "Earthquake" and "The Poseidon Adventure."

Even the posters for "Contagion" emulate those of the '70s by displaying its huge cast of stars, especially Oscar winners Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow and Marion Cotillard. All the poster needs is the '70s period catchphrase: "Who will survive?"

Yet, unlike those earlier notoriously sensationalistic disaster movies, Soderbergh's "Contagion" wants to be a thinking person's terror tale.

It derives its scares not from cheap sensationalism, but from a ruthlessly realistic assessment of what might actually happen should a rogue virus pop up in densely populated communities and proceed to wipe them out.

This approach might have worked brilliantly, had Soderbergh's film possessed a single character arresting enough for us to really care about, or had screenwriter Scott Z. Burns' plodding, dead-end plot lines possessed the power of those in Soderbergh's delightfully complex drama "Traffic."

Business executive Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns home from a trip to Hong Kong, goes to bed sick, and dies. Her young son dies soon after, leaving Matt Damon's Mitch Emhoff, the story's average Joe fixture, with only his young daughter left to protect.

Quickly, other infected populations pop up in London, Paris, Tokyo and cities in China, putting bromide-spouting health officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into action, led by concerned Dr. Cheever (Laurence Fishburne, uttering cautionary sentences with his brow properly furrowed).

Dedicated Dr. Mears (Winslet) stays out in the field, attempting to separate the sick and protect the healthy.

Self-sacrificing Dr. Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) works to isolate the germ's genetic code so it can be reproduced for an antidote.

Rebel scientist Dr. Sussman (Elliott Gould as the film's most intriguing character) continues to work on the germ long after Cheever removes him from the team.

Meanwhile, noble Dr. Orantes (Cotillard) of the World Health Organization gets kidnapped by a Chinese faction who demands the antidote as her ransom.

These by-rote characters would all fit right at home in a made-for-cable TV movie in the era before AMC's "Mad Men" and "The Walking Dead."

Soderbergh does handle creeping viral paranoia with aplomb, and he thoughtfully shuns many of the genre's clichés - <I>oh, no! The doc tore a hole in his Hazmat suit!

</I>But he also downplays the crowd-pleasing thrills we have come to expect, such as loved ones recoiling in horror from the infected patients. (Two doctors examining Paltrow's exposed brain do provide a comical shudder.)

That leaves Jude Law's amoral blogger, Alan Krumwiede, to supply "Contagion" with something approaching social criticism.

Assuming the facade of a conveyor of truth, Alan misuses his social media powers to feather his own nest and spread fear, suspicion and mistrust among his followers.

Could Alan's poisonous use of social media be as deadly as the disease he reports?

Here at least, the social media are more interesting villains than the virus.

An unethical blogger (Jude Law) tries to profit from a disease outbreak in Steven Soderbergh's “Contagion,” partially filmed in Elgin.

“Contagion”

★ ★ ½

Starring: Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh

Other: A Warner Bros. release. Rated PG-13 for language. 105 minutes