You either hate it or love it

Rating: 7/10 (12 February 2008)

I went to watch this film expecting something between Godzilla and I am Legend. No big expectations whatsoever. I was pleasantly surprised in all honesty -- not that this is the greatest action/horror/survival movie ever made, no, not at all. But it did keep me glued to my seat for its entire duration, and left me hanging in there in suspense. That, by itself, justified the ticket price ;) By the way, this movie employs a LOT of 9/11 ambiance, and that's some strong leverage it builds upon. So is this Godzilla? Well, yes, and no, we have a monster destroying NYC, with the military bombing it with B-2's dropping 500 pound bombs to absolutely no effect. The monster also spawns spiders which infect you and you then die in agony. Banal and lame, huh? And you get your basic bunch of people, wanna be protagonists, who start dying off one by one. Even lamer, eh? Also, the entire footage is filmed on a hand-held camera, so if you have motion sickness you're better off watching something else, but I am not taking points away 'cause of that -- this is one of these movies where having motion blur actually does help realism greatly. Acting is pretty much on the level and you get decent special FX too, though, as expected, the plot is quite barren and predictable. The film also utilizes throwing loose ends at the audience's imagination, which I personally find annoying (e.g. you never find out where did this monster come from, who ends up dead for sure etc.), but on the other hand that's probably the better choice with these kinds of films, anyway...
Anyway, my final recommendation to whoever is reading this review -- if you like sci-fi or general horror survival movies go and see this one, it's a solid film experience and does have traces of genre innovation -- definitely better and more ambitious than most of the recent titles in this genre (and I do mean Resident Evil and I am Legend :-). Cheers.