disappointing and flawed, but still good effort

Rating: 6/10 (3 May 2018)

Pretty disappointing considering the hype. There's not really all that much conflict here. The film presents small episodic events that never really seem to amount to much consequence. It's nice that Krasinski tries to build tension with sound, but just watching these characters trying to survive doesn't go far enough to make an entertaining movie. It was just so disappointing how little they ended up doing with the concept, and resorted to an obnoxious number of jump-scares instead.
The story as a whole lacks a significant amount of exposition as well. We are never given any reason to care about these characters, and the film just automatically assumes that we do. I myself couldn't considering how many stupid decisions they make throughout the runtime. Same thing with the monsters. We are never given a backstory to them and my questions remain: what are they? where did they come from? why are they here?
The characters don't talk all that much, but when they do, the dialogue is any is pretty simplistic and boring. The child acting is questionable, while the two lead adults is just passable. As mentioned, I couldn't help not caring about these characters. When all of this is going on, why would they decide to have a baby? Isn't that such an obnoxious and unnecessary risk? Also, when Evelyn's labor takes less than five minutes. If you know anything about childbirth, you would know that labor lasts for a number of hours. Really?
When Lee is sacrificing himself to save his kids, why would he drop his weapon? couldn't he have tried to fight the monster? Speaking of, why have the characters never even tried to fight back? there's only three of the monsters, why wouldn't they have tried shooting them earlier?
As a whole, I felt like this was the middle and end of a movie that was missing beginning since there is so much exposition and information missing.