When I first heard of this film, I thought, “Really? Soderbergh is making an outbreak thriller?” But having seen it, it does fit into his body of work. First, the all-star cast seems less a box office choice but rather a more deliberate decision to tip the hat to the huge star-studded casts of the 70s disaster films: no matter how famous they are, no one is safe from death. That play with the audience’s expectations (‘Oh, they’d never kill off Paltrow!”) helps whatever disaster it is hit home harder. So in a way, this is Soderbergh’s disaster film homage.
The thing here, though, is that the ‘disaster’ isn’t an overturned ship or a towering inferno or an earthquake, but a devastating virus that no one can see or stop. And Soderbergh presents this unbiased killer with his own lack of bias. There’s no condemnation of humankind, no moral lesson or wagging of the finger or “We can do this better” or “Here’s how we become less vulnerable” or even a sensationalist “THIS can happen to YOU!”. It’s just up there as a “here’s something bad that could happen, and how it would happen”. We’re a connected society. World travel is real, government bureaucracy is real, self-interested actions are real, moments of compassion are real, viruses are real. It makes it more of a clinical film than an emotional one, but it’s up there, well-acted and well-paced, for you to take a peek through a looking glass.
