Overrated and overhyped

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

This TV movie is well worth watching especially if you are a disaster movie fan. The movie shows events from several points of view (a nurse, soldier, politician, a family and a pandemic expert) and builds on most of the characters quite well.The acting is acceptable as is how the story flows, the ending is clearly left that way to allow for a follow-up TV series which obviously did not go ahead, so does have a feeling of wanting it to continue to conclusion but the movie does progress far enough to make this a stand alone story.Certainly thought provoking and one of the more believable and credible potential disasters that could occur.

I think that this was a very timely story,, from what i gather here on this site the movie aired on ABC in may for sweeps,, those birds were on a migratory path for North America, in the fall/winter of 07. This movie does go a little overboard in showing you what could happen if the virus mutates and jumps and goes from human to human,, on that fact, i think that the movie is very realistic,, and there should be more movies like this to get the American public to think, instead of just sit on their butts all day. The acting was pretty good,, i like the fact that mostly no names were used in the film.. you kinda get tired of seeing big name actors in disaster movies,, lord knows that we have enough of them. Overall i give this movie a big thumbs up.

Bird flu in America was relatively accurate according to the local conference on emergency management I went to this year. The thing we need to watch for is the first human to human transmission and then all bets are off. The synthesizing of vaccines is right on. Would take months after the flu was identified. Masks are used to keep things in, not to keep things out, so they are relatively useless. Most cases will be caught by touching things infected people have touched and then spreading it to your orifices and open cuts. I never touch my eyes or anything that goes in my mouth without first washing my hands and I have avoided several common flu's out this year. Money is the absolute worst thing to handle. The movie itself, like I said, was relatively accurate. The acting was good and the special effects were good too. For a low budget movie, it was well worth the watch if you want an intro to how a bad pandemic would operate.

Made-for-TV movies hold a dear place in my heart, for some reason I totally fail to grasp. There's just something I love about the inherent "B" quality that always seems to crop up in them. Not everybody sees it this way.I gather from reading the other comments here that many of you tuned in hoping to see a movie. This is a common misconception about TV movies. You aren't really watching a movie, you're watching a two hour long episode in a TV series you will never see the rest of.Actually, the last TV movie I saw about a pandemic disease was the multi-part adaptation of Stephen King's "The Stand," which came out embarrassingly well done. There was none of that here, but what, really, were you expecting? I have no idea how accurate the disease information in this movie is; I don't really care. The fact is that I've seen a fair amount of TV movies by ABC and CBS (none from NBC, though I hear there's one out this week) and I'd have to say that ABC makes a consistently better movie than CBS does.CBS likes to make disaster movies. I saw BOTH "Category 6" and "Category 7" on CBS, and I'm glad to say that "Fatal Contact," though cheesy, is "Citizen Kane" compared to either of these. The characters here are fairly believable, the special effects were not overplayed (TV movies always have terrible special effects, and even their regular effects aren't that hot), and I even liked the ending. I felt it was satisfactory.All told, TV movies are never that good. The case for most of them is that if they turned up in theaters, you would walk out and demand your money back. But with direct-to-TV productions everything's a little bit more freewheeling. Relax, and immerse yourselves in the the heavy-handed plots and shallow budgets of network feature films...