Plays as an extended episode of the excellent Canadian TV show ReGenesis (watch it on Hulu Plus if you’re a fan of this film or Fringe). Soderbergh applies the multi-layered documentary-like formula of Academy Award-winning Traffic (2000) to a global virus pandemic, exploring also the societal implications – the contagion of fear, and morass of bureaucracy.
The fanboys (and girls) will likely be satisfied, and those others of us who trudged through the rest of the movies will find it a more entertaining and quicker-paced conclusion (certainly compared with the insufferably slow Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009), and the interminably boring Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010)). Things come to an end, but because I didn’t much care about the characters, it really wasn’t very dramatic or triumphant or even sad. Truth be told, I did feel a twinge of regret that the vast resources of money and filmic talent could not have been put toward adapting more worthy material!
I came across a post from Bob Cringely (tech industry blogger), riffing on a recent speech by Roger McNamee (tech VC/investor), arguing that Facebook is “so 2010”. In Silicon Valley, it’s the done thing to skate to beyond where the puck is headed, and to call things old before they are new. But it’s a little far-fetched to declare Facebook as over when it has only so far demonstrated pervasive stickiness and not yet proven a scalable profit model, nor has the “next Facebook” yet emerged!
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