This movie is equal parts horrifying and tragic; it's bound to cause some tears to be shed, on or off screen.
All spoilers unmarked.
- Joel's raw Heroic BSoD after watching his two friends (Bohai and Tony) get executed right in front of him, with him being powerless to stop it. His jovial Nice Guy personality just crumbles away and all that's left is helpless screams, cries, and wails from the agony.
- When the soldier pulls his gun on Joel, both him and Lee's stoic facades crack as they plead for his life, all the while Jessie screams not to kill him. It's the first time in the film that Joel shows actual genuine terror as he realizes that his life is at stake.
- After Sammy saves the trio at the last minute by hitting the soldiers with the car, the force of the vehicle accidentally knocks Jessie right into the pit of civilian corpses that she'd been next to. While she'd been going through an increasingly worse Trauma Conga Line already, this is the moment that truly breaks her completely and she's so shaken up by it that she vomits in the car afterwards.
- Sammy is revealed to have been shot in the chest in his attempt to save his friends from the sociopathic soldiers. With no means of treating the fatal wound, poor Sammy slowly bleeds to death over the night with his last sight being of a burning forest where he emotionally reaches out of the car to touch the falling embers. He died just before they reached a Western Force staging area, and no one can do anything but simply lowering his body into a coffin. Every news journalist present takes Sammy's death very hard, especially Joel - who's already devastated with losing his two friends Bohai and Tony as mentioned above.
- Lee's Heroic Sacrifice to save Jessie from getting killed by Secret Service agents. It's made even more tragic given that it was fairly easily preventable, since it was caused by Jessie's own recklessness.
- Since Jessie's been drilled to instinctively take pictures of any violence she comes across and that is exactly what she does when Lee gets shot, it's highly possible that she didn't even realize that Lee had been killed until after she had finished taking her pictures, as she only reacts to it once Lee's dead body is slumped on the ground next to her.
- Joel's reaction is equally heartbreaking. Even though he and Lee had their disagreements and petty squabbles with each other, they were clearly good friends who'd known each other a long time, and while Joel doesn't show it much, it's clear he's utterly devastated by her death. He then completely forgoes his intent on getting an interview with the president and coldly lets him get executed out of anger over his friend having gotten killed by the president's forces.
- The implication that the civil war will still continue to rage on even after the president's death. DC has fallen and the president is dead, but a huge swathe of the country is still loyalist, and they'll continue to the fight. Even if they are ultimately defeated, in a prior scene, characters have discussed that it's only a matter of time that the various seceded factions will turn on each other the moment that the president's loyalist faction is dealt with, which according to the supplementary material involves no less than three major factions that will be competing for supremacy in the wartorn United States. Events that have transpired over the course of the movie showed that most soldiers don't very much care which faction they're fighting for; only that they're out to kill the people trying to kill them or people that they deem not to fit their definition of 'American'. In the end, the United States of America as a country is doomed to become a failed state, and no amount of meaningful photos taken by daredevil war journalists risking their lives every day will change that any time soon.
