YMMV / Quarantine (2008)

• Accidental Aesop: Keep your pets home and attended at all times, even if you live in an apartment building. You never know what they might catch and transmit to you.
• Complete Monster: Henry is a self-absorbed Misanthrope Supreme who orchestrated both outbreaks. A member of a bioterrorist cell, he and his group engineered The Virus and released it in an apartment complex in Los Angeles to test its properties, causing the events of the first film. In the sequel, he infects the passengers of a domestic flight, hoping it would spread the infection to other parts of the country. When his cover is blown, he kills a man and kidnaps a young boy to use as a Human Shield. An arrogant man whose friendly attitude masks a chilling sociopath, his goal was to propagate the virus in a global scale, believing that "Earth needs a good plague", something in which he may very well have succeeded.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Talk about typecasting, one of the victims in the first is Dania Ramirez, who plays the illegal immigrant girl with the ability to spread her own plague in Heroes.
  • Mercedes Mason, who plays Jenny in the sequel, later went on to play Zombie Apocalypse survivor Ofelia Salazar in Fear the Walking Dead.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The film was criticized largely because it is a remake, despite the fact that the original film was never shown in America while in theaters. Problem is, it was owned by Sony, who withheld it in order for Quarantine to come out and be thought of as original. It also didn't help that it was not only a remake, but that it recreated the original film almost scene-for-scene, only significantly altering material which may have been controversial in the United States.
  • Perhaps "unrelatable" might be a better word than "controversial". The ending scene's religious themes were probably removed since American culture isn't as Catholic as Spain's, to say nothing of the post-9/11 conspiracy atmosphere that replaced it. This frequent criticism tends to overlook additions such as the elevator scenes, as well as the characters of Elise and Randy, equivalents to whom don't even exist in the original. Very similar? Yes. Identical? No.
  • Following a request from the actor ("I don't want to play that cop", in his own words), the last-surviving cop was also made more undisputedly sympathetic than in the original film. The original is a Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
• Narm:
  • The camera suddenly whipping back and forth as the cameraman uses it to beat a zombie to death. How did that not break the lens? Spoony suggested that instead, the camera should have suddenly turned to the side before moving up and down, using the sturdier body of the camera as a weapon.
  • Though both movies suffer from Hollywood Darkness, it becomes ridiculous at the end of Quarantine 2, where the script obviously calls for pitch darkness (George is afraid of the dark and they need night googles to see in the dark), but it is just as visible for the viewer as every other scene.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • The pale-bluish skin and mouth foam of the infected, which the characters almost never comment on despite the latter being the most famous element of rabies. Moreso when compared to the infected from the original, who don't have it due to the change to the virus' origin. Tellingly, the infected in the sequel look more like those in [REC], and while the white foam is still present and plot-relevant it is subdued.
  • The infected (obviously just speeded-up) lab rat attacking Doc by biting him on the scalp.
  • The cat screeching mixed in with the infected's screams in 2.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The first quarter of the film is a mock documentary on fire-fighters. When they finally get to the apartment building, things pick up nicely.

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