Awesome Music: The pulsing electronic soundtrack (by Cliff Martinez) does a great job at making an already anxiety-inducing movie even more frightening and compelling. Tracks like "They're Calling My Flight" have a jittery, paranoid feel, while "The Birds Are Doing That" emphasizes the investigative nature of the movie.
The scene where one of the leading doctors fighting against the MEV virus is infected and dies from it is a bit more disconcerting after the leading doctor fighting against the Ebola virus in West Africa was infected and died from it in July of 2014. This was also the case with the Chinese researcher who initially sounded the alarm over COVID-19.
The world's attempts to fight the virus are sabotaged by people spreading misinformation or not believing they're sick, much like what happened in the 2014 Ebola epidemic, to the point where people were accusing the doctors of spreading the disease and were even attacking clinics.
Also people advocating for phony cures, what's eerie is the hoax cure is Forsythia which is named after a flowering plant, and at one point during the COVID-19 pandemic there was an attempt to push Oleander (a notoriously toxic flower) as a potential treatment but it didn't catch on as much as Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine.
Ditto for the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020, which was on a much larger scale and was one of the reasons why this movie got a resurgence of popularity. In both the film and reality, doctors have died on the job while the internet has been used to spread misinformation about the virus, including a much-publicized bunk cure, causing protests against lockdowns and quarantines. In fact, British health secretary Matt Hancock stated that the film influenced the UK's much-lauded vaccination program, largely by showing how things can go wrong on that front. In addition, the final scene showing how Beth contracted the MEV-1 virus in the first place was glossed over for the most part by viewers, until COVID-19 struck.
Dr. Mears; you want to give her a big hug, if not for the fear of infection. There's a reason that she's the CDC's top field epidemiologist, and to the very end, she never stops thinking about others.
Moral Event Horizon: Unlike many disaster movies where no character actively hurts others, we get Alan Krumwiede who makes it big by manipulating people's fear of infection and death and suggests them fake solutions and indirectly causes countless deaths by sabotaging the doctors' attempts to use the real vaccine.
The waiter's death. Instead of just succumbing to the virus like everyone else, the virus causes his vision to blur while he's taking a walk...leading to him being suddenly and quite randomly being hit by a car. It's as tragic as it is hilarious.
The Feds surveillance and capture of Krumwiede in a city park seems bizarrely over the top in terms of how many people they use, considering the severe civil disturbances they're having. After all, he's a web blogger that lives in that city, and there was no need to have any agents close by watching him (which he notices) at all. They would simply film him and later nab him at his home.
Never Live It Down: Beth Emhoff having an affair prior to dying from the virus. Who knew that having an affair could potentially lead to the death of 26 million people? Though it's eventually revealed that that's not how the virus outbreak actually started, audience viewers were led to believe so otherwise.
Padding: Alan Krumwiede seems to be in the film just so there's a human antagonist to root against. Roger Ebert criticized the character in his review of the film, calling his subplot "an alarming but vague distraction" that didn't connect to the main story. Unfortunately, it has somewhat been Vindicated by History thanks to being rather prescient about shady grifters using the Internet to prey on the desperate during national and global crises.
The film is about a deadly virus and as realistic as it can be. Watching this movie when you have a cold is ill-advised.
The film frequently lingers on shots of the various objects characters have touched to emphasize just how often our hands touch random things during daily life, and how many of those things others touch once they're done touching them.
Many scientists felt that the film was a little too optimistic and that an effective vaccine in real life would take much longer to develop and manufacture. And then there's the whole issue of a popular media personality lying about other possible cures, which undermines the doctors working on a real cure.
Realism-Induced Horror: No zombies, nothing supernatural, just a contagious disease with a high mortality rate. Note how the Acceptable Breaks from Reality listed on the main page are mostly to make the disease easier to solve.
The Scrappy: Krumwiede is meant to be a Hate Sink, but falls into this instead, as his character has little point other than being as annoying and Obviously Evil as possible, and takes up a good deal of the film's runtime while having little depth or character development. Jude Law's bad Australian accent doesn't help matters.
Special Effect Failure: A minor one in a movie that really didn't have all that much in the way of special effects, but in several scenes it's obvious that Jude Law is wearing fake bad teeth, particularly in the close-ups during the on-air interview.
The bats in the ending sequence also also were also awkwardly rendered as well - the bats flying out of the fallen trees wouldn't look out of place in a bela lugosi movie.
Squick: Beth's autopsy, in which blood from her liquefied brain spurts onts wo the doctors examining her corpse. That's to say nothing of actually seeing them dissecting a human body in all its cringey realism. Christ, this scene gives Jigsaw's brain surgery in Saw III a run for its competition money.
have a jittery, paranoid feel, while "The Birds Are Doing That"