YMMV / Special Bulletin

• Harsher in Hindsight: Thanks to 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, etc.
  • Watch the live news footages of the WTC collapse on 9/11. The anchors all start cracking just as depicted here.
  • The evacuation scene is a bit harsher after a major mess resulting from the evacuation from Hurricane Floyd in SC.
    • And before that, the damage and destruction in Charleston after Hurricane Hugo in 1989, just six years after this aired.
  • After the terrorists were killed, there is a scene of evacuees rejoicing in an evacuation shelter. One was waving a Confederate flag, which is harsher after the Emanuel AME shooting.
    • During this scene, the camera pans from the frantically-waving Confederate flag to the reporter broadcasting from the shelter...who just happens to be African-American.
  • The WTC Twin Towers are prominently featured in the backdrop of the RBS news studio.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Even if you knew it was a Phony Newscast, it looked very much like a real newscast of the time. Add that it was topical (this was made in the darkness before glasnost) and had a Downer Ending, and you got chills if you saw it when it first aired. Anticipating this, the network insisted on placing disclaimers after every commercial break and superimposing the word "simulation" over key scenes, in order allay viewers' fears that this was not actually happening. There were still reports of some people panicking, regardless.
    • Even more alarming were later re-showings that did not carry such warnings, especially to viewers who had not previously heard of this movie.
  • The scene in which RBS reestablishes a live link to their news crew aboard the USS Yorktown is major league nightmare fuel. The haunted and terrified Meg showing a shot of the resulting firestorm, then running tape of the nuke actually exploding is bad enough. The poor woman kneeling over the dead body of her colleague in the murky light, and nervously asking about when the radiation will start hitting them and whether they're all going to die... all of this live on the air... yikes!
  • The first live picture from Charleston after the bomb went off. Everything is on fire, the streets are filled with the dead and the walking wounded, and in the background, civil defense sirens are sounding...
  • It's also pretty stomach-churning listening to the voices of the NEST team gradually deteriorate from steely professionalism to abject panic as they vainly attempt to disarm the bomb.
  • Wife and mother Diane Silverman, whose reason for joining Dr. Lyman's group is never explained beyond being a friend of his, is the the first of the terrorists to be shot dead, on camera, by the commandos. Since we were introduced to her husband and children earlier in the film, there's every possibility they saw her die on live TV.
    • Especially since it was established that they live in a Philadelphia suburb, far from the area affected by the (intentional) power outage.
• Tear Jerker: Both in-universe and out-universe: Everything post explosion.

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