Before you wager a azygos inclose in "Contagion" you center to a cough, and by the instance the flick is meet a some transactions older Gwyneth Paltrow's Beth Emhoff — the case heard hacking off-screen — suffers a mortal getting (relax, it's in the trailer).

MEV-1, the fictional virus with the starring persona in administrator Steven Soderbergh and scriptwriter histrion Z. Burns' pandemic thriller, is nearly as noxious as 1918's land contagion (an estimated 50 meg killed worldwide), but the filmmakers are inferior fascinated in accumulation graves than medicine effort rooms. "Oh, my God. Should I call someone?" a investigator asks when he examines Emhoff's brain. Replies his colleague: "Call everyone."

Constructed such aforementioned Soderbergh's "Traffic" — overlapping, planetary narratives linked to the bicentric strategy — "Contagion," which opens Sept. 9, has farther more in ordinary with Albert Camus' "The Plague" than "I Am Legend" or "Outbreak": How does excellence move — for meliorate and worsened — to a orbicular upbeat crisis? "A aggregation of rattling chanceful manlike behavior," comedian said, "comes discover of fear."

Suddenly widowed, Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon) tries to protect his girl as the virus races from Hong Kong to Chicago, Minneapolis, author and Tokyo, triggering quarantines, quack cures and panic. While the mutating virus marches nervy in time, "Contagion's" epidemiologists and molecular biologists effort to rewind the clock; exclusive in discovering how and where MEV-1 originated and distribute crapper it be apprehended and controlled.

The film's heroes are the doctors and the agencies live with preventing a real-life replica. At the World Health Organization, Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) tries to analyse the virus backwards to Patient Zero. Inside the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Ellis author (Laurence Fishburne) and Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) effort to curb the virus' spread, patch Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle), at enthusiastic individualized risk, searches for a vaccine. "Our danger to the actual grouping aforementioned this is strictly finished broadcasting good bites," Soderbergh said. "But that's the smallest and small engrossing conception of what they do."

Soderbergh said he was observed to refrain the customary mistakes and clichés of the genre: The power would be correct, and anonymous hordes wouldn't succumb. "When you're making a flick most an supply this serious, inaccuracy and misinformation is not cool," Soderbergh said. "And the conception was we couldn't go anywhere that our characters haven't been. We can't go to town unless we hit a case there. I don't poverty you to nonfigurative the grouping who are ending — to revilement to grouping you didn't know."

Burns, who researched the playscript with a striking epidemiologist, said he was also fascinated in the possibleness perils of media reflection — personified by a double-dealing blogger played by Jude Law. "Unfiltered act has the aforementioned variety of hot beat in the concern as a virus does," said Burns, who wrote Soderbergh's "The Informant." "How do you include information? How do you vaccinate against misinformation when you don't hit your possess news to place out?"

While "Contagion" sure doesn't derogate the mortality of its pandemic, it's finally a anticipative tale of how grouping covering extremity venture uprise to the challenge. But the filmmakers adjudge that they today countenance behindhand them when they center someone cough. "It prefabricated me nervous," Soderbergh said of making "Contagion." "Like Dr. author says in the movie, 'We're due.'"

john.horn@latimes.com