Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Contagion (2011)

This is topic Contagion (2011) in forum Film Handlers' Movie Reviews at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Sam Graham (Member # 2889) on 09-24-2011, 10:01 PM:

CINEMA: 13th Avenue Warren, Wichita, KS
AUDITORIUM: 11
PRESENTATION: 35mm/Mystery Meat Digital/THX
PRESENTATION PROBLEMS: None [Cool]

RATING: Two and one half stars (out of four)

THE PLOT: A woman gets sick. Wackiness ensues.

What the hell? What's all this public in panic crap? I didn't expect that. I expected this largely to be mostly focused on the science. Not War of the Worlds panic.

There isn't a LOT of the public panic, but it's there. There are times where the movie abruptly solves an ongoing dilemma and moves on to something else, as if we're seeing a long trailer for a really long movie.

One in a group of confused kids walking out asked "So were they blaming the destruction of the rain forest for the virus?"

Posted by Jonathan Goeldner (Member # 4854) on 09-30-2011, 10:02 AM:

it was a great cast, interesting premise but largely a mediocre film - folks over at blu-ray.com have the general conclusion: seen it once, don't need to ever again.

I can't stand the Uptown theater here in DC, the projectionist somehow projected the 1.85 aspect ratio film with the screen in it's 2.35 framing, resulting in the tops and bottoms cropped off - they did this for 'Source Code' and again for this - ugggh!!! - just reinstall the 35/70mm projector and dump the Christie DLP unit, its created new problems.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 10-01-2011, 03:15 PM:

Location: Carmike 8, Lawton, OK
Auditorium: #1
Image: JPEG 2000, 1998 X 1080 pixels
Audio: PCM 5.1 audio
Presentation Problems: none
Rating: 3 stars out of 4

I watched this last night with a date. The choice was between Moneyball and Contagion. She picked the latter because it was marketed as being scary. While the movie had numerous opportunities to scare the audience it picked a far more conservative route.

There was still enough in the movie to like for me to narrowly give it 3 stars. I like techno thrillers and this movie had a lot of that geeky kind of stuff you could read about in books like The Hot Zone, although that book is a more scary and more interesting read. It came close to being knocked down to 2.5 stars or even just 2 for various missed opportunities and some odd dramatic swings that just didn't seem to follow through. I can't get more specific than that without spoiling things.

Image/audio quality wise, it was not great, but not bad. The movie hinted at that video look from time to time. Some of the color choices had me thinking "wow, someone doesn't know how to white balance for fluorescent lighting." Not a whole lot going on with the sound mix since it's very dialog driven. The music score seemed to do more to pump up the sound field than anything else.