Pretty good, if you stop about halfway through...

Rating: 5/10 (26 August 2018)

...and imagine a good ending in your head.
So, I came here to read reviews afterwords because i didn't want spoilers before hand and honestly I like to form my own opinions first. I was excited to see this because I like post apocalyptic settings and the premise of an average family trying to live in such a world hooked me. How to survive, moral choices, etc.
But I can't even with this flick. All the other nonsensical bits have already been outlined very accurately by others MANY times on here so I'm going to try and avoid rehashing them all.
TBH I'm still wondering how this got the high praise that it did. It felt like most of the time the writer wasn't self-checking their own story logic\mechanics or if they were, they were answering themselves with "Because, SUSPENSE!"
Like my title hints, I liked the first part of the movie. Even though the sequence in the beginning with the young boy, toy and walk back to the house already had me SMH, I was still on-board.
I was ok with the pacing of the story, family trying to do family stuff in a beaten world, showing us how they live. It was clear that some decent thought was put into these aspects.
I had questions piling up about things we're shown but it was early yet and I figured there would be an explanation provided later as most stories tend to do.
But they never came.
Some of my harder head-smack moments:

The dad is like a Tony Stark level tech-genius, why? Who was he? What about mom, was she a doctor? Why do they live on a farm? We never get "introduced" to the characters. So it's kinda hard to connect with them.

Mr. Stark clearly has his place wired and hooked up, cameras, radios, loudspeakers, the works. Why not use it to your advantage to distract/confuse the creatures?

They also clearly have lots of electricity on tap, from WHERE? There's public infrastructure in place yet? HOW? A "post-apocalyptic world" kinda implies that you won't be booting your Mac to check Facebook anytime soon.

Bare feet, why? It doesn't make you that much quieter. Pass on the heavy boots but try some soft-soled sneakers or other light shoes and you're gtg. Life's hard enough in that murder world, show the feet some luv sheesh!

Dad never wants to let his daughter into his uber man-cave, why not? She have a bad habit of chewing live wires? Who knows! But she seemed very smart and with a little guidance they prolly could have worked together to figure things out quicker.

Near the end of the movie their basement hideout starts filling up with water leaking in from above, broken pipe I guess. But there's water pressure yet? The creatures wiped out most of humanity and military but were ok with leaving a few people to keep the utility services up and running I guess. They should have hooked up a TV, maybe HBO still had something good on.

Now I've heard that this was based off a written story and I cant help but wonder if a lot of details that would have fleshed the movie out or explained things better, were left out as insignificant or were just lost in translation. Which is a shame because it really had potential.
But the thing that really chafed and what compelled me to write this, was the way the main plot mechanic of the movie was executed.
We have some kind of hybrid\alien\mutant apex predator that uses sound to hunt but by about the halfway point of the movie that idea has fallen flat on it's face.
It's a cool idea, I liked it and I was waiting for them to flesh it out more for us.
Sadly, nope.
In some scenes were shown that some sounds are ok as long as they're muffled or soft. Or if you're by a louder ambient sound source you can make more noise as long as its not louder than the ambient noise. Ok, I was on board with that.
But then there are several scenes where we see these creatures picking up sounds that by previous accounts they should have ignored as regular noise or would have been too soft to notice. So now the mechanic has changed again and by these new rules almost ANY sound: running on sand, child crashing through the corn, heavy breathing or blinking too loudly should have gotten this family wiped out long ago.
It seemed like the writers changed it only for drama and suspense-sake but unfortunately this turned an otherwise cool creature into a cheap plot device.
Further I keep wondering how these things, which move at like 30MPH, don't brain themselves on posts or run off cliffs?
They're blind and use sound to find prey. But in order to navigate an environment they would need some kind of echolocation\\sonar. If they had it then we're never clearly shown. That would also make them that much more lethal because now they can "see" moving prey.
That also would have meant the story would have to be rewritten.
Which, yanno...maybe?
Anyway, some may say you just need to suspend "reality" and enjoy the movie but let me try to clarify. Because I'm not one who seeks to poke holes in plots just to be snide. Like I said, I wanted to like this movie more but as a viewer I ended up becoming so frustrated because the writers kept changing their worlds rules.
As a writer, you want to tell a story. But part of that job is to also explain your world to the readers, or viewers in this case. Things that define this place where the characters live. We need to know how the world works, what things are ok to do, what things are dangerous, etc. Once we know the mechanics and layout we can start investing ourselves in the characters and the situations they encounter. Because we understand the world we can become immersed in the moment: "Oh gods don't drop that!", "Yes, hide in there, it should be safe!", "I hope he stays quiet!"
Things like that.
But when you create a world where you keep constantly changing rules that you've shown us previously and present no reason why, other than it suits the moment better, then people end up feeling cheated. There's little point in trying to journey with the characters because you no longer feel you understand how things work and expect they'll just be changed again five minutes from now.
This would be akin to having a scene in The Walking Dead where a walker suddenly starts talking fluently to one of the protags to tell them some critical bit of plot info. You'd be looking at the screen like "Wait...HUH?"
5/10, for a good concept but really need to have the story developed MORE.