Abduction

Nathan Harper (Taylor Lautner) is a teenager who lives with his parents, Kevin (Jason Isaacs) and Mara (Maria Bello). He has a recurring nightmare, and consults a psychiatrist, Dr. Geraldine Bennett (Sigourney Weaver) to discover why.

One day, Nathan is partnered with his neighbor and longtime crush Karen Murphy (Lily Collins) on a school assignment about missing children. Karen finds a website that shows how the children would look like as adults, and Nathan discovers that a young boy named Steven Price would look exactly like him, when Price got older. Searching in his basement, he finds the same shirt that Steven is wearing in the picture and realizes that he and Steven are the same person.

Nathan calls the website's owner, unaware that he is a Russian terrorist. The man reports back to his commander, Viktor Kozlow (Michael Nyqvist), who deploys two agents to Nathan's house. They attack Nathan's parents, who tell him to run before being murdered and the house is destroyed. Nathan and Karen escape and attempt to call the police, but the call is intercepted by CIA operative Frank Burton (Alfred Molina), who tells Nathan that he's in danger and sends a team to pick him up.

Before the team arrives, Dr. Bennett appears and tells Nathan that Burton can't be trusted. She reveals that Nathan's biological father, Martin, is a CIA agent who stole a list from Kozlow with the names of corrupt CIA operatives and that Kozlow created the website in order to locate Nathan and use him as leverage to force Martin to return the list. Kozlow's men appear, having intercepted Nathan's call. Bennett tells Nathan to run away and head for a safe house in Arlington, Virginia. Karen decides to go with Nathan. Before they leave, Bennett tells him he can only trust his father and a man called Paul Rasen, and blows up her car to facilitate both their escape and her own.

Nathan and Karen arrive at the safe house, where Nathan finds Martin's cellphone as well as an address and photo of his biological mother, Lorna Price. They discover that she is dead. Nathan visits her grave and notices fresh flowers, so Karen asks the caretaker about recent visitors. He reveals that the last visitor was Paul Rasen from Nebraska.

Nathan and Karen head to Nebraska on a train; Kozlow's right-hand man follows them. When Karen leaves to get food, he kidnaps her and attempts to capture Nathan, but Nathan overpowers him and throws him off the train. Karen escapes and reunites with Nathan. They leave when the train stops in response to Kozlow's agent's death. Nathan takes Kozlow's agent's phone during the fight.

Burton and his men find and convince the two that they want to help. They stop at a diner, where Burton tells Nathan about the list. Nathan checks Martin's phone and finds the list, which contains Burton's name. Before Burton can react, Kozlow's men attack the diner and kill several of Burton's men. Nathan and Karen escape while Burton and his partner kill Kozlow's men.

Kozlow's right-hand man's cellphone rings and Nathan answers it. Kozlow reveals that he has planned to kidnap Karen's parents and will kill them if Nathan doesn't give him the list. Nathan agrees, but says that he'll choose the place of the exchange. Kozlow agrees. Nathan realizes that his nightmares are due to repressed memories of Lorna being murdered by Kozlow while trying to protect him.

Nathan decides to give Kozlow the list at a Pirates baseball game, and reveals to Karen that he actually intends to kill Kozlow. Nathan receives a call from Martin (who is also at the stadium) who tells him not to give Kazlow the list. Nathan ignores his advice, and tries to shoot Kozlow, who steals the gun and tries to force Nathan to give him the list. Burton's men, stationed all over the stadium, open fire as Nathan escapes, with Kozlow in pursuit.

Martin calls Nathan and tells him to lure Kozlow to an open area. Nathan does so, and, as Kozlow prepares to kill Nathan, Martin (Dermot Mulroney) kills Kozlow with a sniper shot fired from a nearby building. Burton's men appear and capture Nathan. On their way to CIA headquarters, Burton attempts to decrypt Martin's cellphone. However, his superiors reveal that Martin has warned them that Burton would attempt this in order to remove his own name, and Burton is detained.

Martin calls Nathan one last time and apologizes for everything. He says that he'll always be watching over Nathan, who reunites with Karen and Bennett, who tells him that she has arranged for him to live with her until he graduates, at which point he can move out to attend college. Nathan thanks her and leaves with Karen for a date in the empty stadium.

Contagion

The film follows several interacting plotlines, with no single protagonist, over the course of several weeks from the initial outbreak and attempts to contain it, to panic and decay of social order, and, finally, to the introduction of a vaccine.

Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns from a business trip to Hong Kong, after briefly stopping in Chicago to cheat on her husband with an old flame. Two days later, she collapses with severe seizures in her suburban Minneapolis home. Her husband, Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon), rushes her to the hospital, but she dies from an unknown disease. Mitch returns home and finds that his stepson, Clark, has also died from similar symptoms. Mitch is put in isolation but turns out to be immune to the disease. He and his daughter attempt to flee the city, but a quarantine has been imposed, and they are forced to return to their home to face a decaying social order and rampant looting of stores and homes. Mitch struggles to give his daughter, who has a lengthy wait for a vaccination and is thus quarantined to their house, a sense of normality while trying to come to terms with his own loss. For prom night, he decorates the living room and invites his daughter's boyfriend, who got vaccinated in the meantime.

In Atlanta, representatives from the Department of Homeland Security meet with Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and express fears that the disease is a bioweapon intended to cause terror over the Thanksgiving weekend. Cheever sends Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, to Minneapolis to begin the investigation and traceback. Dr. Mears has to negotiate with local bureaucrats reluctant to commit resources and becomes infected with the disease while staying at her hotel. The Minnesota National Guard arrives to quarantine the city, and a badly deteriorating Dr. Mears is moved to the field medical station she helped set up, where she later dies.

Investigations into cures via treatment protocols or vaccines initially prove fruitless as scientists cannot find a cell line to culture the MEV-1 virus. Professor Ian Sussman (Elliott Gould) violates orders from CDC scientist Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) to destroy his samples and identifies a line of bat cells that will support research of a vaccine. At the CDC, Dr. Hextall uses this breakthrough to begin to characterize the properties of the virus, which turns out to have a mix of genetic material from bat and pig viruses and appears to spread via fomites with a basic reproduction number of two.

A conspiratorially-minded freelance journalist named Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) posts video blogs, claiming that he has recovered from his sickness using a homeopathic cure based on forsythia. Panicked people attempting to obtain forsythia overwhelm pharmacies and also accelerate the contagion as infected and healthy people congregate. Krumwiede leaps to national attention and, during a television interview, accuses Dr. Cheever of informing friends and family to leave Chicago before a quarantine is imposed. It is later revealed Krumwiede was never sick but was attempting to boost demand on behalf of investors in the companies producing and distributing the treatment.

Dr. Hextall identifies a potential vaccine, using an attenuated (live) virus. Because of the difficulties of human subjects testing, she follows the precedent of other vaccine researchers and inoculates herself first. Hextall visits her gravely-ill father in the hospital to expose herself to the virus and test the vaccine. Production of the vaccine is rapidly ramped up, and the CDC awards vaccinations via a random lottery based on birth dates for one full year until every survivor is vaccinated. Dr. Cheever, remorseful about the deaths that his delayed action indirectly caused, gave his fast-tracked vaccination to the son of a janitor (John Hawkes) he works with at the disease center.

Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) is a World Health Organization epidemiologist who traveled to Hong Kong to find out where the sickness originated. While there, she identifies Emhoff as patient zero. Epidemiologist Sun Feng (Chin Han) kidnapps Orantes to use her as leverage to obtain the first vaccines for his village. After the vaccines arrive, Feng exchanges Orantes for the vaccines, which turn out to be placebos. Orantes rushes to notify the villagers.

The film concludes by showing how the virus originated. Emhoff's Minneapolis-based mining corporation is actively clearing jungle, and a bulldozer knocks over a palm tree in which bats were nesting. They fly out, and one bat, the vector, lands on a banana plant, eating a chunk of banana. Not having its tree to return to, the bat flies to a nearby hog building, where it drops the banana into a pig sty, where a pig eats it. The pig is then sold and slaughtered and is shown being prepared by a chef in the Macau casino Beth Emhoff was in. The chef smears the pig's blood on his apron but does not wash his hands before shaking Beth's hand, thereby infecting her with the disease.