Trey, could you elaborate on your statement "Book of Eli can't possibly be about what people say it is about"...?

/Z

So what 4...5 years?

Just finished the episode and I sort of had the same reaction Teague did.  It felt, for lack of a better word, kind of clinical.  Like Teague said, I felt like I was reading a report.  To be fair, I'd never seen it before, and so I was watching with subtitles and listening to the episode, so that's not gonna help with getting immersed in the film.  But what I think could be the problem (for those of us who feel this way), and Teague sort of alludes to this I think, is the way the stakes relate to the characters.

As ever, Mr Spock gets to the heart of the problem: we find it easier to understand the death of one than the death of a million.  The stakes in this film are really abstract and not human-scale.  Hundreds of millions of people are going to die, and that's hard for us to get our head around (and not something (thankfully) that most people have any direct experience with).  So what we need in order to ground that is to have some direct sense of what this is going to mean for our characters. 

There's a couple of problems though.  The obvious one is just the sheer number of characters.  And what little time we have with a chunk of them I think is just wasted, in a dramatic sense, in the service of this kind of verité vibe.  It feels like we spend a lot of time watching people on public transport in the first bit of the film.  They're on buses, they're on planes, they're walking down the street.  But we don't care about these people in a story-telling sense because all we've seen is them being on planes and walking down the street.  They're just killed off too quickly.

Now say Trey and Brian (if I understood where they were coming from correctly) might say that these are some of the things that give the film "scale".  You get the sense that lots of different people are affected all over the world and each person is potentially infecting hundreds of others, etc.  It's not just an American thing, or just about Kate Winslet.  But the film doesn't need more scale.  When we see 2/3 of the map of the world covered in red and they announce at the end that whatever million people are dead, I'm not sure that the little time we spend with the young Asian guy, the business colleague of Gwyneth Paltrow's, or Gwyneth Paltrow herself really helps us viscerally understand that any better. 

Then kind of problem number two is the way the stakes relate to at least some of the characters that we do spend time with.  Laurence Fishbourne's character, for example, doesn't help concretize the abstract stakes for us the audience, since he's precisely invested in those stakes in their abstract form.  In other words, he's working to avoid The Bad Thing.  If he fails, The Bad Thing is going to happen.  But his character doesn't help us understand what The Bad Thing really means any more clearly or viscerally.  Same deal with Elliot Gould's character, and the woman who tests the potential vaccine on herself. 

It's like you filmed my Head of School coming into my office and announcing "My God, none of the students will graduate if we don't get these course marks in!" and then the next 15 minutes is watching me grade exams and organizing the Joint Board of Examiners meeting.  Sure I'm working my ass off to avoid The Bad Thing, but there's no reason why you should care, or derive any entertainment from watching me do it, unless you happen to find exam grading interesting.  And watching me do my job doesn't concretize the abstract stakes in any way, since I as a character am invested in the stakes abstractly.  (I want to avoid The Bad Thing.)  On the other hand, if we spend time with some student that was likeable, and we saw that her parents were going to disown her if she didn't start this job, and she couldn't do it without graduating, then I think we respond to that a little better.  It's not just about inserting some hackneyed sentimental movie beat.  The point is that we the audience now have some concrete investment in the previously abstract stakes.  We understand what The Bad Thing is going to mean.  It's the death of one, as opposed to the death of millions.  (And a better writer than me could I'm sure come up with a cleverer way of doing that than what I've proposed.)

Then we come to Matt Damon's character, who we spend, relatively speaking, a lot of time with, but who is a terrible protagonist.  We learn very quickly (and suspect even sooner when he doesn't drop dead in the isolation chamber in like 2 seconds like everybody else) that he's survived, or is immune, or whatever.  So that tension goes out of it since we know he's orthogonal to The Bad Thing.  And then he doesn't actually do much.  He keeps his door locked, talks to his daughter's boyfriend and gets turned back trying to cross a bridge.  It ain't Errol Flynn, that's for sure.

Not surprisingly then, Kate Winslet's character is probably the most successful as she's really the only vehicle through which the stakes get made concrete, even if she too is just doing her job for most of the time.  And she has the makings of an actual protagonist.  But she's dead by the hour mark more or less, which still leaves us with like 40% of the film still to go. 

Various of the guys made the point that part of the interest in the film is supposed to be about is the way that various people react to this catastrophe, and that seems like maybe that's got something to do with Matt Damon's purpose in the film.  But that feels to me like a very thin hook to hang a lot of film on, and I don't think the film does anything interesting with that idea.  Sure, human beings are human beings, and will react in a full spectrum of ways.  But I knew that from watching The Towering Inferno.  Some people are noble, some people are venal, some people are cowards, etc. etc., and I don't know what this film adds (or wants to add) to that.  (By the way, do any of these characters, even Kate Winslet, pass the Plinkett Test?)

The whole subplot with Marian Cotillard for me is like the film in a nutshell.  We spend a lot of time watching her do her job, which is great, but we don't have any reason to really care, since all she's doing is trying to avoid The Bad Thing.  Then she gets kidnapped, and I guess that's bad, but since she's not much more than a (minor) cog in the plot machine, I don't particularly care about that either.  Then there's all those seemingly nice people in the village, but all we get is a cursory two seconds of her teaching some kid to paint or whatever it is, so I don't really care about them.  And then she sets off running from the airport, but it's like Anakin Skywalker wanting to go back for that clone fighter pilot at the beginning of Episode III.  It's just too little too late. 

I totally get where people are coming from in terms of the film making no concession to the standard tropes, and I do admire it for that.  It's great that government officials are all sincere, hardworking people and internet bloggers are self-aggrandizing, manipulative scumbags (um, I think).  And it's certainly great that people bothered with the science.  I guess I just kinda bounced off whatever it was supposed to be in the service of.

Thank. You. Sellew.

That's like 90% of what I was trying and failing to say.

Basically just summarizing the above comments far less eloquently—ever since I read The Stand, I've thought that, in terms of characters and stakes, this movie needed to be the first third of that novel, only with a happy resolution instead of most of the world dying and paving the way for Randall Flagg. Say what you will about King, he's great at assembling a core cast with distinct personalities that the reader cares about. If Contagion featured a Larry Underwood or a Nick Andros for us to latch onto, and put them in a nasty situation similar to Larry's walk through the New York tunnels or Stu's escape from the government quarantine, I'd love it.

Every time The Insider comes on cable, I watch it. I remember when it came out, how boring I thought it sounded: A research scientist for a tobacco company gets fired, involved in a high-stakes lawsuit, and gets to be on 60 Minutes. But sheesh, the way Mann tells that story, it totally works. It's over two hours of guys in button-down shirts arguing about non-disclosure agreements, and I'm goddamn glued to it. It also has an epic verbal smackdown scene.

As I think I said in the commentary, I absolutely get why this movie isn't for everyone.

And that's okay - it just leaves more for meeeeeeeeee.  And Brian and Paulou and Zap.  We few, we happy few,  we band of brothers.

I ruptured several major blood vessels listening to this episode.  I agree with Teague and I thought he made several excellent points (the multiple viral elements in the film, Soderbergh being like Fincher, the movie not working for him) but he kept getting shot down.  I love so much of this movie in theory, but in reality... I guess I need to watch it again to see what I'm missing.

Last edited by HabeasPorpoise (2013-08-29 10:11:29)

(I'm only like 30 mins in to the comm so if this was covered in more detail apologies, but judging from the posts in here so far, it hasn't)

That has me thinking, it almost feels like it might be the kinda of thing where the movie lays out all of these points of what is going to happen in an outbreak and then ticks them all off, and then You as an audience member can look at it intellectually and go, "Hmm, oh yes, I can see how that would be quite bad." But there is zero emotional attachment to it. I hesitate to say you don't care, because they are still human beings, but it's a Dunbar's number thing, the movie never actually gave me a reason to put any of it's characters into my 150 for the time I was watching this movie so I have no emotional reason to "really" care about what's going to happen. They are just numbers in a wiki article, and names that mean nothing to me. So the entire thing just winds up feeling more like a visualised thought experiment than anything you might call a "movie".

Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2013-08-30 02:38:14)

Not sure if the fellas ever ended up naming her in the episode, but the Streep-y actress who played the scientist is called Jennifer Ehle. (She killed it in Zero Dark Thirty, and she's going to be in the new Robocop film that's slated for release in 2014.)

She truly is the Streepiest person this side of Meryl herself. Even more so when they have the same hair color:

And this is Meryl's daughter, Grace Gummer, who is on The Newsroom now, as the guys mentioned in the episode:

But how do we know she's not actually Ehle's daughter? I'm just asking the questions...