C+

You have to admire the craftsmanship of Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion,” particularly the way in which a half-dozen story threads have been melded into a smooth, seamless whole by the director and editor Stephen Mirrione. Given the complexity of the narrative, with its many shifts of chronology and locale, the fact that the film is so easy to follow is quite an accomplishment. But while the technical juggling act is impressive, emotionally the picture is about as cold as wintry Minneapolis, where one of the major plot lines is set.

Scott Z. Burns’s screenplay follows the process of a flu pandemic that ravages the world over the course of roughly five months, beginning at day two (as we’re helpfully informed by on-screen titles) as Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), a Minnesota executive, gets suddenly ill during a business trip to Hong Kong and returns home, spreading germs (as the film artfully suggests in some clever shots) along the way. Soon she and her young son are dead, and her husband Mitch (Matt Damon)—the boy’s stepfather—is quarantined, though he proves to be unaffected. The CDC is soon involved, with its Director Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) sending Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) to Minneapolis to take charge of the investigation.

Meanwhile a California researcher (Elliot Gould) isolates the virus, called MEV-1, and CDC scientists Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) and her assistant (Demetri Martin) begin work to find a vaccine. Public order is also an issue, and brings military man Lyle Haggery (Bryan Cranston) into partnership with Cheever. Meanwhile, WHO’s Dr. Leonore Orantes (Marion Cotillard) goes off to China to locate the source of the outbreak, which leads her to a small village—and a Chinese government man with an agenda of his own. Meanwhile muckraking Internet blogger Alan Krumwiede peddles the notion of a conspiracy between the government and pharmaceutical companies and pushes homeopathic remedies for the disease.

This is a small army of characters to keep straight, and it’s only the beginning. There are also Mitch’s daughter and her neighborhood boyfriend, as well as a janitor (John Hawkes) at the Atlanta headquarters of the CDC, as well as Cheever’s wife (Sanaa Lathan), to whom the good doctor reveals some inside information that will come back to haunt him. Add the crowds of nameless folks involved in the riots the picture portrays occurring as grocery stores run and governors close their states’ borders (as well as, in the later stages, endemic home invasions). (It seems that all the violence occurs in the US—or at least all that’s depicted in the film. By contrast, the Chinese we see behave with remarkable docility, and there are no explicit portrayals of similar acts elsewhere in the world.)

Soderbergh’s effort to keep all of this straight—tracing the course of the epidemic’s spread, both by showing how the number of victims grows exponentially over time and periodically jumping back in time to offer hints about the causative factors behind it—is impressive for its control and clarity. But curiously enough, although the film is about a catastrophe that involves all of mankind, he doesn’t manage to invest it with much humanity. He tries with some characters, particularly Mitch, whom Damon gives some emotional depth (however generalized)—although the addition of a subplot about Beth’s infidelity seems extraneous—and Mears, whom Winslet portrays sympathetically as she becomes a victim of the virus herself. The Cheevers are meant, one supposes, to add to the human dimension as well, but both of them remain stick figures—as do all the others in the large cast. A few (like Paltrow) get a chance to emote at high levels when their characters are in the throes of illness, but that’s not quite the same thing. Most of the roles really have no more nuance than those in the disaster epics of the seventies, and just as was the case then, however handsomely you cast them, they’re still cardboard—most notably Law’s Krumwiede, who demonstrates that he knows the fellow is a comic-book villain by overplaying him wildly.

And the fact that “Contagion” is beautifully made—a major exception being Cliff Martinez’s throbbing score, more irritating than exciting—doesn’t remedy the emotional vacuum at its core. This is more a cinematic autopsy than an affecting drama—a cool, detached dissection of an enormous human tragedy; and while it certainly succeeds as a semi-documentary account, it fails to deliver a strong emotional punch.