Sometime around now… maybe earlier in the summer… Steven Soderbergh was expecting to be coming out with his most commercial non-Ocean’s film in a decade, Moneyball.

Didn’t turn out that way.

So what comes out of the quiver in response? A masterpiece bound by the genre it lives in, but a masterpiece all the same. As Out of Sight flipped the romantic comedy and Erin Brockovich flipped the do-gooder movie and Ocean’s XX riffed on the rat pack flick, Contagion drives Steven right into Irwin Allen territory, where he uses all of his craft and collaborators to make a film that never feels like the schlockfest it could well have been.

Simply stated, Contagion is about the life of a pandemic. How does it start? How does it spread? How do governments react? How do regular people react? How will they stop it? Can they stop it?

There really is no star of this film. Matt Damon is the most consistent presence, offering the audience a regular guy to identify with, though Scott Z. Burns’ script pushes that too. Damon’s behavior is not always comforting. There are unexpected notes… and that’s what makes the film (in that element) so much more than The Towering Influeza.

In the early stages, as we meet hot doctors, from a sponged down Kate Winslet to Marion Cotillard to Jennifer Ehle, the fear of stunting grew in my belly. But all of them settle into being the great actresses that they are and their roles in this worldwide drama and the fear subsided.

Throughout the film, the characters behave in ways that make sense to their characters. They rarely feel symbolic. They are each pieces of a massive jigsaw puzzle laid out by Scott Burns. Just when you think you may be on to a stock character in Jude Law’s raging blogging tweeting defrocked journalist… ambiguity leans in and reminds us yet again that these are real people.

The thing that freaks people out about this film is the same thing I experienced – and most of you probably have – looking though medical magazines and seeing those giant pictures of the organisms that live all around us, including on our bodies. If you think too much about it, it’s paralyzing. And indeed, when you walk out of Contagion, you will look at the door handles of the theater and the parking ticket validation machine and your lunch a little differently.

So let me ask you… are you going to the movies to get numb or to feel something?

Winslet kills in this movie… it’s one of her best pieces of work… incredibly subtle and egoless and not just for lack of make-up. It’s performances like this that make the film work as art and not show biz. Loved Elliot Gould. Jennifer Ehle has two supporting roles this next month that make a lot out of a little screen time. Laurence Fishburne is a solid central wheel, clearly now entering the third act of his career. But it’s all the little pieces and small parts that really glue this film together. Matt Damon is a star, but Anna Jacoby-Heron, in her first film, as his daughter, is absolutely critical to giving him ground from which to push off.

Cliff Martinez delivers the best score of the year so far. Stephen Mirrione, on the Avid, keeps everything moving along but comprehensible. Peter Andrews does beautiful work here (for a bald guy) and helps keep clarity with subtle (and some not so subtle) variations of the look from story segment to story segment. And all the other departments are top of the line.

Scott Z. Burns delivers his second great screenplay collaboration. This project was never more than a few inches from being a hyperbolic, cartoony mess. And both in words and structure, Burns hits it out of the park. One never knows how these collaborations work between writer and director, so off-the-set, one never knows who made the choice for a character not to speak, for instance. But when a movie like this clicks, a lot of credit has to go to the architect. It’s almost impossible for it work so well without those very strong blue prints.

And Soderbergh… still one of the dozen great veteran filmmakers working in the world. There are those who would look to more arch artists around the globe and hold Soderbergh as too accessible (before slaughtering any film he makes that is experimental). But much as I would love to see what Francis Coppola or Scorsese would do with virtually any script being produced at any studio at any time… that’s how I feel about Soderbergh. He’s missed. But he’s out there swinging. He is A FILMMAKER. He is not satisfied to just go by the book. Like The Coens and Kubrick and Van Sant, he’s planting seeds when you watch his work. And he is not so worried about whether you leave the theater with a handful of flowers… you’ve been infected.

Contagion is one of those films that will be, as Soderbergh is, taken for granted by some critics. But it’s so much better than just being a thriller… which it is. It makes the audience a part of the world he is creating, whether that’s the scientific world or the world of loss or the world of longing… and he allows us in without telling us he’s being generous or making us work too hard or letting us off too easily.

It seems antithetical, but breathe the movie in and you will get the bug. Keep the mask on and you’ll get part of it – which still may be fun – but it will take longer for the whole experience to sink in… if it ever does.