Steven Soderbergh has called Contagion as an Irwin Allen movie, and considering the panoply of stars and high death toll he’s certainly got a point. The best line in the trailer - “someone doesn’t have to weaponize bird flu, the birds are doing that” - may imply that there’s a schlock factor. There isn’t. (A line like that is just too good to pass up). What sets Contagion apart is a very pronounced, very un-Hollywood philosophy: let's cut the bullsh*t and show what this would be like if it really happened.

On one hand, what we have here is one of the finest “breakdown of society” movies I’ve ever seen. On the other hand, wasn't this movie called "OUTBREAK" in the 90's?  Anyway, If you’re the type of person who finds the opening credits montage the most frightening aspect of Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead, you will absolutely lose your mind during Contagion. Unlike The Walking Dead or Y: The Last Man, the instigating event to the apocalypse in Contagion is (sigh) a very real threat. Read Flu by Gina Kolata - or better yet, don’t, because maybe you like sleeping at night.

We’ve seen the imagery of 9/11 exploited effectively in the decade since the attacks, from War of the Worlds to Cloverfield but nothing I’ve seen has captured the extended feeling of heightened anxiety and dread like this. Contagion, for me anyway, is the story of what we were all worried would happen – another attack on 9/12, followed by another on 9/13, until everything we ever took for granted about our civilization is completely turned upside down.

Individuals navigate waves of information while calculating morally gray survivalist moves. The confusion reaches fourth-wall levels as major players drop in and out of the story, leaving the audience as uneasy as the characters. For the first time in a long time you will think to yourself "I don't know what's going to happen next in this movie."

Much of Soderbergh’s recent work has a very specific look and feel. He perfected it on the ahead-of-its-time HBO series K Street and it popped up again with Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience. It’s a cool video hum, lots of color saturation, uncluttered sound design and a near pointillist style of editing. He’s never really applied this form to one of his “movie star” movies (it’s not quite the way to go with The Informant!, The Good German or Che, not to mention the Oceans films) and it’s quite gratifying to see it on a larger scale movie like this.

The scale of Contagion is what's so remarkable. It has a huge cast and multiple story threads, but it never gets confusing. More uniquely, it never gets conventional, either. There are no cutaways to the president, or humongous, extended crowd sequences. Did you prefer Children of Men to Battle: Los Angeles? Yeah, I thought so.

Maybe it’s just because I have a tendency to have recurring nightmares about the end of the world (don’t cry for me, though, my frequent nocturnal visits to the island of frisky plus-sized models more than makes up for it) but Contagion hit me where I lived. It is one of the best movies of the year.