Empire BIG SCREEN has been running in London over the weekend. Previously we posted a first look at footage from the 3D version of Titanic, and Paul W.S. Anderson’s Three Musketeers. Saturday morning also featured ten minutes of Steven Soderbergh’s pandemic plague flick, Contagion.
The scene opens with Gwenyth Paltrow. As she sits in an airport talking on a phone, it moves into a series of dialogue-free vignettes, showing how the virus spreads A man staggers through Hong Kong, obviously infected – A woman in London going about her day A man in an airport lounge in Dubai Back to the woman in London, sweating and suffering, then dead Back to Paltrow in Minnesota, at home with her family A man dying on the Tokyo subway, and finally back to the man in Hong Kong, still ill, moving through the city. He walks through the market, into the road, and is about to be hit by a truck…
Unsurprisingly for Soderbergh, the footage was slick, glossy and the preview well put together. Given the lack of dialogue it’s hard to get a real feel for how the finished film will be, but it certainly impressed the audience in the room.
