An audio and visual assault

Rating: 1/10 (19 January 2008)

Making a movie is definitely a team project, which involves a group of talented professionals spending considerable amount of time and money in shooting, editing and post production finishing, presumably test viewing of something that theoretically, should at least turn out to be reasonably acceptable judging by common sense of an average person. It is exactly this nature of movie making that makes me the more bewildered and dumbfounded whenever I witness something that's truly awful. Unfortunately, this movie turn out to be one of them.
The whole movie is made from the perspective of a rather loud and dimwitted individual defies all common sense, shakes and bumps his handycam throughout 10 hours of ordeal of his friends trying to survive an apocalyptic event. During the 2 hours sitting, I've been constantly asking myself, why hadn't anyone who participated in the making of this movie tried to ask this one simple question: isn't it more plausible for him to ditch the camera and run for his life? Why on earth did he keep recording instead of offering a helping hand like a normal human being when his friends needed his help the most.
Common sense aside, the viewing experience is crude and downright torturing. It is actually physically nauseating. I kept wishing that the cam is just a deploy before the real movie begins. I was wrong. By the end of the movie, which is one of those wtf ending, I felt violently ill.
I understand the intention of the director, which is trying to make this movie appear to be as real as possible. It turned out to be a really cheap trick and gets so obvious and old 30 minutes into the movie. How can you convince your audience the experience is real when the very gimmick to draw your audience in totally unreal at the same time. A real person would have put down the damn camera as soon as the hell broke loose. Instead, the guy kept shooting and mouthing and yelling and violently shaking the camera for 2 hours.
There're just so many this type of movie out there nowadays. So the director choose to do something different, which is understandable. But he ultimately failed when he decided to put all of his eggs in this one shaky basket. He bet the whole movie on the "Blair Witch Project" inspiration. I know the comparison had probably been made by others already. They are not the same. The difference is: it works well for Blair Witch Project, it totally failed for this movie. Blair witch project had a purpose of filming through the handycam. This movie had no purpose and it's very unappropriated for the guy to keep shooting the cam under this circumstances.