Such films may be reflecting the current sense of creeping social breakdown, in which all traditional structure and means of keeping order are rendered useless, and our survival on a day-to-day basis is strictly down to us. Steven Soderbergh's new film Contagion is not a zombie movie — nobody comes back from the dead — but it speaks to the same fears, the same sense of helplessness in the face of an enemy which is all around us but appears to have come out of nowhere. Here, it is an unknown virus which we see passed from one to another, via a bowl of nuts on a bar, a credit card, a cough, crossing continents and causing Gwyneth Paltrow to foam at the mouth within the first 15 minutes or so. 

Soderbergh's take on the disaster movie is to make it more into a thriller, similar in form to his award-winning Traffic about the drug trade, with an almost documentary style — you learn quite a lot here in the way of statistics and variables relating to deadly outbreaks. This, and the studied underplaying by the main characters, has the effect of making it all seem utterly plausible, even inevitable. Starting on Day Two of the outbreak — Day One is saved right until the end — the ferociously fast progress of the virus is tracked with a sense of realism and logic which, paradoxically, leaves you asking why, if it's really this straightforward and easy for humanity to be brought to virtual extinction, it doesn't happen more often.

I was certainly carried along by the tightness of the story. There are no gaping holes in the plot that I could see, none of the unlikely coincidences or superhuman feats of daring you see in your traditional bogstandard disaster movie. And the disparate but interconnecting characters allow for all sorts of interesting bases to be covered — the presence, for example, of a powerful blogger (Jude Law), full of conspiracy theories, allows the conflict between new and old media to be explored (a story line which could have made a whole movie by itself).