Too much melodrama, not enough monster.

Rating: 3/10 (20 January 2008)

A lot of the reviews I read about this state that the camera work is the only real negative about the film. Other than that it seems that people, for the most part, really enjoyed the movie. I will however start off my review by saying; the camera work was the least of my problems and in fact the camera work didn't really bother me at all. However, I was bothered by just about everything else that the movie had to offer.
Warning: Spoilers in this review.
The "relationship" that was a major part of the film was, in a word, boring. It wasn't at all interesting and didn't make me any more interested in the characters then I would have been had we just been thrown into the middle of the film with no previous knowledge of the characters. None of the characters were at all likable, so I pretty much wanted them to die... well except Marlena she was kind of cool. The relationship melodrama that was going on in the uninteresting people's lives was so dull that beginning party sequence bored me to such a level that when the attack finally came I looked over at my friend and said "Finally, now these annoying people can start dying."
I had heard from several people that the movie was scary and suspenseful so I was at least hopeful on that level once the attack started. However, none of the "scary" moments were at all scary, I saw each and every scare coming from a mile away. As soon as they went down into the dark subway it was pretty obvious that they would get attacked down there and then when the attack finally happened they gave it to much build up that it didn't surprise or shock me. Also, when they were flying over the monster in the helicopter and they were cheering because they though it was dead I just knew that it was going to jump up and hit the helicopter. Which brings up the question, if the pilot of the helicopter was supposed to be evacuating these people why was he just flying directly over the monster while it was being bombed, why didn't he change course and get the heck out of there? Which then brings up the question, how did they survive the helicopter crash? The pilot dies but the three main characters somehow survive? How does that work exactly? The movie seriously should have ended with the helicopter crash; it would have made a lot more sense.
Some of the scenes of the monster attacking the city were pretty cool. One scene that stands on in my mind in particular is the one that happens right before they go down in the subway where the tanks roll in and start attacking the monster and the main characters are just kind of stuck there with nowhere to go. That was actually a very cool scene; however scenes like this were too few and far between to keep the movie interesting for me.
I will agree with some of the things I have read that the CGI was very well done, especially considering that all the shots were hand held. I am sure it is hard enough to animate a monster into a movie when the camera is still, but it has got to be extra hard when the camera is going all over the place. It probably becomes much harder to find references for where to put the monster from frame to frame.
So, in short, the characters weren't at all likable or interesting and the love story was dull. I never really felt that there was any suspense in the movie because all the scares were predictable. The only cool parts were when the monster was destroying the city and there really wasn't enough of that to justify an 84 minute length. And it is pretty sad when a movie is only 84 minutes and is unable to even justify that short length.
I feel the movie could have benefited from maybe seeing everything from more than one perspective. Perhaps instead of finding one camera, the military finds three cameras at different places in the city that see different things. This definitely would have helped the movie reach feature length without having to pad it with the uninteresting melodrama, because honestly the relationship part of the movie felt like it was just there as filler to get the movie up to a length that they could actually show in the theater.