Contagion
Steven Soderbergh is some kind of sociopath, or maybe a robot. His movies are soulless and the characters always lack humanity, like if you asked some super computer to describe a person and it would map out every wrinkle and nervous tick but totally miss the humanity. The best example of this kind of film making is Che, a movie that is unbearably long and full of minute biographical details, but that utterly fails or perhaps never even tries to tell you a single thing about the person you are watching for four hours.
The good news about Contagion, is that it is a perfect match of film and director, its basically a procedural of a deadly epidemic that sweeps the globe, with doctors, politicians, and ordinary Americans struggling to find a cure. There is no human story beyond small snippets of the lives of the characters involved in fighting the plague, the result is a collage that feels more like an extended documentary than a movie, Soderbergh is right at home with this material. The result is a fun roller coaster ride, I was always into epidemic movies, and this tops Outbreak for the best of the genre. Its serious and doesn't fall for the various trapping of Hollywood cliches, heroes are forgotten, villains walk free, and just because somebody is important, doesn't mean they cannot die. I thought this was cool. Still without any real characters to care about (there is one great performance despite very limited screen time) its more of a ride than a movie, and I do not see why anyone would watch this twice, though by all means see it once.
7/10