Starting the year off with a colossal letdown

Rating: 3/10 (22 January 2008)

Jesus, what a disappointment. I didn't eat a thing all day cause I thought I'd get motion sickness from the movie. The only part of the movie that was unbearably shaky was the very beginning. For some reason, once the monster shows up the camera steadies a bit. Now, of course no sane individual would go towards the monster, cause if they didn't we'd have no movie. But I have an issue with the number of people who went. Out of the five who attempt to rescue Beth, only three have any business going. Rob wants to save his love, Jason naturally will follow his brother, and Jay's girlfriend will naturally follow Jay. Only problem, Jason doesn't go with Rob thanks to a series of unfortunate events. That rules out the reasoning for Lily to be there, and leaves only Rob with a legit reason to travel into the heart of Manhattan. Even then, Beth is not Rob's girlfriend; she is merely his crush. He is willing to risk his life and the lives of his idiot friends (he doesn't put up a fight when the volunteer to tag along) to save the chick who blew him off. That leaves Hud and Marlena. Marena barely knows any of these people, yet she tags along. At one point, she and Hud bring this up; Marlena busts a Clerks-like "I'm not even supposed to be here!" (which is true), and Hud questions why she came. Bad move! Films shouldn't call attention to their own plot holes unless it's for comedy's sake. Hud also has no reason to go, other than curiosity. Am I really supposed to believe that the guy can't wait long enough to get out and watch CNN in the morning? This was supposed to be intense and thrilling. The only real moment of suspense came in the subway tunnels with the lice. Even then, the setup for the scene was ludicrous. If you see a herd of mice (or any animal) running in one direction, run in that direction! They just power walk until they hear something, then stop and fidget with the camera. How stupid do you have to be? However, the lice attack was truly terrifying and the only real jolt of the film.
The monster is the source of so many plot holes I couldn't focus on the movie. If this thing came from the depths of the ocean, how can it breathe on land? Why does it have legs? Even if it can breathe, how does it survive in the drastically different climate of land, where there isn't the crushing pressure of deep ocean as well as a different make up of nitrogen and oxygen? The thing looks so unadapted for marine life that I wish they had just made it an alien. Many people complain that they wanted more monster and less crappy acting. While the acting is bad, I think they gave you too much monster. Hud's final scene serves only to give us a closeup look of the thing, but we got a hell of a lot of revealing glances along the way (I assumed the way people talked about it that the most you got was a roar and a foot. Instead, you see the whole thing several times, but at a distance.) Also, the lice bring up questions. If they infect anything they bite leading to an Alien-like chestburster explosion of blood, why hasn't the monster been infected? I don't think there are enough creatures in the deep sea to feed the huge number of lice on the creature, so how have they survived the thousands of years that the monster has been underwater?
Abrams and Goddard came up with this elaborate back story for the monster involving a Japanese corporation that makes a drink called Slusho. Note that what I'm about to say may seem like spoilers, but at no point in the movie does any of the following come up: Slusho's main ingredient is a super-sweet nectar found in the depths of the ocean. Apparently, this is the monster's source of food, and when the drink becomes a hit, Slusho mines the hell of it, draining the beast's food supply. If the thing lives off nectar, why does it have such a predatory mouth (it looks like it was made to kill)? It should be something like a proboscis to suck the nectar from the water. I understand that Abrams and Reeves couldn't reveal this within the confines of the first person POV of the film, so why bother? It's like they tried to tack on a point to the film, making it as much about consumerism's effect on the world we live in as Godzilla was about the atomic age. But you can't do that if it doesn't appear in the film. This is why I never got into Lost.
The first person POV was something I got behind, and it remains the highlight of the film. It made the subway scene and some monster reveals actually scary and tense. The rest was just annoying. The group makes frequent stops that are too long, yet they make rash decisions during this time of rest. The dialogue is bad, but happily there isn't too much of it. It made me feel like I was there even though every shoddy line took me right back out. It also didn't help that whenever I saw Lily, I couldn't focus cause the moron is running around in heels. Yeah right.
In the end, this was marginally entertaining at its best moments, but I spent way too much time laughing at the idiocies, bad acting, and glaring plot holes to be fully engaged with this film. 3/10