"Contagion" feels like a film that was written by someone who saw "Outbreak" and thought, "That's not what would really happen!" so they wrote a truer account of what would go down if there really was a global epidemic. The problem is that, for as silly as some moments might have been in "Outbreak", the fiction makes for a more interesting movie. While Steven Soderbergh did a great job directing the film and the performances were strong across the board, the film felt to me more like a case study of what would happen and less like a movie. Michael O'Sullivan of the Washington Post probably said it best when he wrote, "Plays less like a conventional medical thriller - think "Outbreak" - than like a dramatic reading of a "Nova" episode, performed by Hollywood's elite."

The next paragraph is a little spoilerish so you might want to skip it but it doesn't really change that much.
One of the moments that I considered true to life but unnecessary in the narrative form is the race to find out where the virus came from. Now, "Outbreak" went crazy with this angle and basically made finding the source the key to saving the day. In "Contagion", they spend a decent chunk of time in the beginning scouring surveillance footage, trying to find where the outbreak began but then they just move away from it. They know pretty much from the jump what caused the outbreak (an unholy but not in that way meeting of bat and pig) and, after a while, they just kind of stop looking for the cause. (Oddly enough, they also only look into humans and never follow the trail of the food at the ground zero casino. You'd think that, if they knew it came from pig and bat, they'd have seen if there was anywhere a pig or bat might have been connected to the casino.) The film ends by showing us exactly how the epidemic started but by that point, it's pointless. It satisfies the audiences curiosity but it's literally anti-climatic.

BACK TO NON-SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT

I think the main issue was that there were so many storylines that each character's journey though the horror that would be an epidemic is told in fast forward. I know I've said this before but this film would have been much better served as a mini-series or even a one off full 20 episode order. For all of Soderbergh's experimenting with distribution methods and storytelling, it's too bad that he didn't attack this storyline with similar out of the box thinking and tried to really delve deeply into each character and various different angles of the story.

"Contagion" is a well made piece but I was never all that engaged and I felt oddly removed from the proceedings. The whole thing just kind of felt muted to me. It's a rental.