The Containment Team Is Too Ambiguous to Characterize

I disliked certain things in this film, such as the unnecessary use of flashbacks to build to the cripplingly obvious plot twist when linear storytelling would have been less plodding. However, I didn't mind the implication that the central family's motivation to survive is potentially ethical and not "selfish."

The writing left the role of the containment crew open to interpretation.

When people say that the "government" (i.e., the force behind the containment team) is in the right, they're making assumptions, since we don't know anything about the containment crew's ultimate aims. Seen through the eyes of the infected, the military quarantine members looked like fascists of some kind and were ready to execute a mother and daughter even though the man giving the orders expressed regret. That POV is meant to establish empathy for people who don't normally receive it in films -- plague carriers -- but it also creates ambiguity about the crew's role. The purpose of containment could be to save the rest of humanity from a lethal or mass-murderer-creating disease, but it also could be to stop groups of ordinary people from becoming powerful enough to disrupt a fascist regime, or to allay the fears of people who anticipate the disease is deadly and destructive without fully understanding it.

Since the brothers who wrote and directed this flick also wrote and directed Stranger Things, I'd say they seem to be exploring the same theme: Extraordinary powers are given to humans cast in an awful light by their particular society and by powerful symbols of fear in any culture. Those same humans are capable of being humane and must learn to control their powers just as normal humans must. In the meantime, they are hunted, and their challenge is this: to stay alive in order to outlast or out-think the hunters, to perfect what they can do, and to learn to protect others from their power as thoroughly as possible.