Contagion/YMMV

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• Artistic License: Biology: Massively averted. There were only a couple of howlers, such as the trouble that they had growing the virus in cell culture, the reason cited that it "killed all the cells". Though some viruses are extremely difficult to grow in cell culture in the Real World, culture killing is pretty routine, and doesn't affect the ability for the virus to grow. There also were references to DNA; paramyxoviruses are RNA viruses..
• Artistic License Statistics: Several statistics about diseases are used throughout the movie; most of them are wrong. More Egregious, however, are the two or three instances where an In-Universe statistic about the virus is obtained or explained with math that is completely wrong. The crown prize goes to the scene early in the movie in which it's stated that an average person touches their face 2000 times a day or 2-3 times per waking minute. The first part is wrong, and the second is not actually mathematically equivalent to the first. It's also ridiculous.
  • Waking hours: 16, 16x60x2 = 1,920. But yes, still a grossly exaggerated statistic.
  • Alan claims that if each person is infecting 2 others, on the first day 2 people will be infected, then 4, then 16, then 256, then 65,336 and so on. Of course, in reality, if you have 256 infected people, and they each infect 2 people, the next day you'll have 512 new cases, not 65,000. The correct number sequence is 2, 4, 8, 16, 32... In other words, he wants a geometric progression, not a quadratic. If he was doing the sums wrong to scare people, then fair enough, but he explicitly quotes results based on the proper series later in the scene (he says it would take a month to infect a billion people, and sure enough, 2^30 is just over a billion. Using the incorrect series, it would take a week -- indeed, just one day after 65,336 were infected you'd have 4,268,792,896 cases).
• Critical Dissonance: The Rotten Tomatoes rating was a strong 84% while the Cinemascore was only a C-. Strangely enough, it had strong legs at the box office despite the bad word-of-mouth.
• High Octane Nightmare Fuel
• Paranoia Fuel: LOTS. It's about a deadly virus and as realistic as it can be.
  • Watching this movie when you have a cold is ill-advised.
  • For fun, start coughing at random points during the movie. Works best in a crowded theater.
• Special Effects Failure: A minor one in a movie that really didn't have all that much in the way of special effects, but in several scenes it's obvious that Jude Law is wearing fake bad teeth, particularly in the close-ups during the on-air interview.
• The Woobie: Dr. Mears; you want to give her a big hug, if not for the fear of infection.
  • Iron Woobie
  • Mitch Emhoff, as well. Despite all the horrible things that happen to him, he manages to stay strong for his daughter. Until the very end, that is.
• What an Idiot!: Dr. Cheever's wife, who told her friend about the impending Chicago quarantine despite being specifically warned not to. The friend then posted it on Facebook, which gave Krumwiede ammo to use against Cheever and the CDC in general.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: See Artistic License Statistics above.
• The Scourge of God: First person to die of the disease was committing adultery at the time. Make of that what you will.