Plot holes, wrong casting, poor direction

Rating: 5/10 (14 August 2019)

I am perfectly aware that you cannot (and you shouldn't) compare a movie with the book behind the story. This is a fact.
However, this rule works if 1) the script make sense, 2) the casting is correct and 3) the director knows what he is doing. This movie failed in all of them. Let's me going a little deeper in each point.
(1) Script. This was a tough job because the book was already borderline. The original plot is about the appearance of mysterious events involving people going nuts (homicide and then suicide) for no apparent reason. The "epidemic" started in rural Russia and in few weeks it hit Alaska and then all the country (and countries worldwide). It took weeks if not months and was not a sudden event. This is important because in the meanwhile news reported that just before people goin' nuts, they claim to have seen something "incredibly beautiful", something that apparently you cannot withstand with your "logic" and that it "cooks" your brain cortex. The "short-circuit" effect seems delayed and/or negligible (at least in the short term) in people that are already "crazy" and in animals. This is not a minor thing because it explains why all the bad guys in the movie seems to behave normally while planning the worst. At a certain point you understand than the reason of this epidemic are "creatures" that are somehow not compatible with us; the book never explains who they are, why they here or even what they look like. The only thing we get is that they would never harm you directly and, apparently, they don't even want to. Whatever their intentions are, if you (or an animal) watch them too closely, you get nuts.
Any SF/Fantasy book need a suspension of disbelief from the reader and that's part of the deal. However the book is so stretched in the realm of disbelief that you keeping reading just because it is well written and the characters well analyzed.
The movie fails along all the line in some minor aspect (windows are not totally obscured, the "voices" of the creature, a love story that wasn't in the book, the raiders in the two black cars, no guns, ... ) and some major stuff. Which? Malorie raised the two kids all by herself (everyone else died in the very same day she gave birth to them) for 6 years. This is very important because most of the story is about her instructing the children since they were infants to use their ears and not the eyes to explore the environment. When she eventually decided to leave the house, the kids were perfectly at ease as "radar" once blindfolded. Not frightened and defenseless kids. No rescue mission from her when the girl adventured out of the boat. BTW, the river had no rapids and this make sense; can you really believe that a blindfolded person would survive that without even falling into the river? So many plot holes that even the NYT made an article on the issue.
(2) Sandra Bullock. Are you kidding me? Malorie is supposed to be a young woman (25-30) and not a 55 yo woman pretending to be a young mother. Tom,DIED with all the others and there was no romance btwn them. BTW, he was not black. This per se would be a minor point, but if you take into consideration that in the movie they decide to transform George (Greg in the movie) from the fully organized owner of the house (the one that posted messages in local newspapers at the very beginning of the epidemic to inform everyone interested that he had a safe place to share) to a dull gay character then you wonder why they did it. Should we think than every movie done in the US now MUST comply with an unwritten code for political correctness, even if they need to rewrite a character so that to transform a "neutral" one into something that fits with the agenda? This is more than a suspect if you see it happening in EVERY single mainstream movie.
3) the direction is confused, with few ideas and with poor logic. Again, how it comes that you see the the daylight everywhere in the house?