This movie revolves around a virus that threatens the existence of the human race due to its unknown identity and its origin. Contagion starts off in a city of the U.S showing a man who lost both his wife and his son due to an inexplicable new infection. After numerous deaths in the same city and people showcasing the same symptoms of the sickness, people start to realize the extent and gravity of the virus especially the medical researchers. The virus catches the attention of the world due to its rapid spread and its undiscovered cure. The plot thickens as many conflicts arise due to the loss of moralities which causes the World Health Organization to take control and try to stop the virus that threatens the survival of the humanity. 2. What …show more content…
A deadly disease is more likely to result from a country with more environmental problems than a country with less environmental problems. Another realistic element to the movie is when they incorporated a ruthless character who lied about having a cure for the virus because in the real world there are always going to be people who want to benefit from any situation given even if its as disastrous as a deadly disease. Also, the virus gained a lot of attention around the world because of the severe consequences that came with it. Therefore, the attention given to the virus seemed realistic and relatable to the zika virus since both viruses raised awareness to various people due to their undiscovered …show more content…
Zuger’s opinions are very clear that she believes this movie is just another Hollywood movie that has tried to make a frightening but true story more extreme and aggressive. She states that Contagion has exaggerated many of the situations that did not happen in real life. For example, she said the virus started from a woman that has come back from another country but in reality, the virus has never been outside a rural setting. Another reason she gave was that the movie went by really fast considering the fact that the virus in the movie had been known to the world in only a few days. She also points out the things that seem impractical like when the people working for the government and the quarantine didn’t care about individual rights and when the whole city had turned into chaos and everyone was affected. In addition Dr. Zuger goes in more depth explaining that unlike the story in Contagion, when there is a spread of a virus, especially a deadly one, everything moves slowly- the patients waiting for a cure, the doctors waiting for the treatment to be found, and the scientists trying to find the
Steven Soderbergh’s film Contagion (2011) opens with a blackened off-screen shot accompanied by the sound of an unseen person coughing and then cuts to a tired sweaty Gwyneth Paltrow eating nuts out of a shared bowl at an airport bar. Superimposing “Day 2” in red lettering, Soderbergh initiates a wave of unanswered questions and his slow reveal heightens the drama and gets under your skin. The simple and effective opening begins a journey that traces the path of a new virus as it spreads across the globe, moving from host to host with the ease of a touch. Contagion uses a realist style to comment on the links of globalization, and the connected technologies that enable the rapid transmission of a virus which takes advantage of our networked
For this assignment, I choose to watch How To Survive A Plague directed by David France. The documentary was focused on the aids crisis in the 1980s. The men were introduced to an illness called HIV positive or aids. The majority people who had aids were the gay people when they had sexual interactions with eachother and did not use protection. There were a couple of women who were HIV positive as well but it was to their understanding that their husband were gay.
With the zombie metaphor referring to uncontrollable fears in today’s modern society, the thriller is a realistic speculation about an airborne virus entering the human species and spreading on a global scale. With influenza outbreaks being a familiar scenario within modern society, the fear of an uncontrollable disease sends shockwaves of fear through the human race, especially when a vaccine has yet to be found and distributed, like in the film. The fear of a viral infection spreading stems from the idea that people do not simply “give” another individual the virus; a virus is a form of life that evolves and mutates in order to survive environmental changes. This virus searches for a new vulnerable host in order to survive and carry the disease to the next victim. The critical aspect around the spread of a virus is how drastically the reproduction process occurs. Without being controlled, the contamination throughout any species causes the spread to take place in a toxic way, “On day one, there were two people. And then, four and then, sixteen. In three months, it’s a billion. That’s where we’re heading” (Dr. Erin Mears, Contagion). Though the zombie metaphor focuses primarily on fear involving unconscious contributors and their mission of adding to their population, the fear of governmental control and how society responds to the epidemic is also an issue that needs to be considered. In this scenario, the viral
The movie, And the Band Played On, discusses the origin of the AIDS virus and how it spontaneously spread across the world. It used the Ebola disease to foreshadow the forth coming of another serious disease. The world was not prepared to handle such a contagious plague. Doctors around the world assumed that the first cases of the HIV virus to be just an abnormality of a certain disease, their carelessness of this matter was the start to the spread of this disease. Throughout this movie, it illustrates different points, such as the beginning of HIV, the misconceptions it gave, and the panic it aroused amongst doctors and the common people.
The movie, And the Band Played On, directed by Roger Spotswood demonstrates how the AIDS epidemic spread rapidly across the world. An epidemiologist, Don Francis learns about a very rare epidemic outbreak among gay men known as AIDS. A disease that bought 4,123 cases and was given little importance caused 2,917 deaths. Dr. Francis joins the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to find the cause of the disease and afterward a cure. Working with less money and old equipment Dr. Francis also has to deal with politicians and the gay community. Furthermore, he has to reason with the CDC who thinks the disease is transmitted through blood. Throughout the movie, Dr. Francis faces many controversies and rivalries among CDC, FDA, blood bank, and the government who doesn’t seem to care about this epidemic.
This movie shows the struggles of people with health insurance that have to pay an arm and leg to cover co-pay or the cost of the medications that is not covered under their health insurance. Within the first 20 minutes of the movie, you instantly become angry of what some of the people had
West Nile Virus has emerged in recent years throughout the temporate zones of Europe and North America. Causing a variety of conditions in its hosts, the most serious manifestation of WN virus infection is fatal encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) in humans and horses, and many birds.
“The Day After Tomorrow” and “Outbreak” both raise important concerns regarding the world that we live in. The first movie seems to serve mainly as a warning that as a people of this planet we need to do everything in our power to stop destroying our world. “Outbreak” demonstrates the vulnerability of the United States and for that matter all nations of the world in dealing with large epidemics. Though both movies raise legitimate concerns they also both are quite sensationalized in order spice it up for moviegoers. The most effective movie in providing a wake up call for humanity is totally debatable and is entirely dependent on the eye of the beholder.
The Ebola Virus is an extremely deadly virus found in Africa. There have been multiple outbreaks across Africa and one in the United States. The Ebola virus basically causes uncontrollable bleeding externally and internally. Then your organs become liquefied. This usually results in death(www.encyclopedia.com). The following report contains info on the characteristics and history of the Ebola Virus.
The Ebola Virus Ebola is a virus and part of the negative-stranded RNA family known as filovirus. It was discovered in 1976 in Africa and was named after a river in Zaire. When the virus is looked at under an electron microscope, the filoviridae appear to be long, thin and occasionally they have 'branches' sprouting from one place or another. Ebola can also take the form of a U or a B. There are four known strains of the virus; they are Ebola Sudan, Ebola Zaire, Ebola Reston and Ebola Tai. Ebola Reston only causes disease in monkeys, but the rest of them take approximately 8 hours to duplicate itself.
The Ebola virus was discovered in 1976. It has four strains, each from a different geographic area, but all give their victims the same painful, often lethal symptoms.
The Ebola Haemorrahagic Fever, or Ebola for short, was first recognized as a virus in 1967. The first breakout that caused the Ebola virus to be recognized was in Zaire with 318 people infected and 280 killed. There are five subtypes of the Ebola virus, but only four of them affect humans. There are the Ebola-Zaire, Ebola-Sudan, Ebola-Ivory Coast and the Ebola-Bundibugyo. The fifth one, the Ebola-Reston, only affects nonhuman primates. The Ebola-Zaire was recognized on August 26, 1976 with a 44 year old schoolteacher as the first reported case. The Ebola-Sudan virus was also recognized in 1976 and was thought to be that same as Ebola-Zaire and it is thought to have broken out in a cotton factory in the Sudan. The Ebola-Ivory Coast was first discovered in 1994 in chimpanzees in the Tia Forest in Africa. On November 24, 2007, the Ebola-Bundibugyo branch was discovered with an approximate total of 116 people infected in the first outbreak and 39 deaths. The Ebola-Reston is the only one of the five subtypes to not affect humans, only nonhuman primates. It first broke out in Reston, Virginia in 1989 among crab eating macaques.
Thesis Statement: The deadly virus Ebola is killing thousands of innocent people world wide, but there are some simple steps that are being taken to prevent this coming tide of death.
Imagine going to bed one night and everything in your world is perfect and normal; you wake up the next morning and suddenly the world is horrible and everyone is getting sick and dying. How would you feel? That’s how Contagion is. When Mitch Emhoff’s wife comes from Hong Kong and she is very sick. She ends up dying within the first ten minutes of the movie. That’s what makes Contagion different than all of the other mass outbreak stories is that the main character is killed off within minutes. Contagion is a movie for the young and the old. It is the only movie out here that perfectly describes how the world would react to an outbreak of this kind. Contagion is an extraordinary film with a lovely plot, terrific acting and out of this world
Contagion on the other hand puts the fear in people to make them understand that a pandemic can be isolated, but once it begins to spread it can easily become