What to say, what to say...

Rating: 1/10 (6 February 2008)

Here goes...
First and foremost, anything that relies on a gimmick as a major selling point is normally nothing more than a ploy. I'm referring to both the filming and marketing style.
The necessity of the party scene made sense. The introduction of the protagonists. Although, the characters offered the audience almost no opportunity to empathize or even understand who they were or how they felt. Instead, we were treated to people who had no real problems. They had no depth. If they intentionally weren't supposed to have depth, that would mean that the central focus of the movie would be on the monster as it is the other medium of expression. This can't be true, though, as the monster receives very little screen time and no back story.
The beginning shows the time stamp in the lower left hand corner. This only reoccurs as the snippets of Rob and Beth's relationship are shown. The rest of the film doesn't have this time stamp. Most, if not all camcorders, automatically show this unless the feature is turned off. Since this was turned on the last time the camcorder was used, I doubt it was turned off. It's appearance throughout the film, I'm sure, may have been offsetting, but it would fit in with the motif the director was going for and dispel some of the ambiguity that plagues the film.
The director seemed like he wanted to remind people that it was filmed with a hand-held camera at times. The camera would shake excessively for almost no reason.
Rob is obviously no older than 28. To get promoted to VP of a company is more than impressive (even more far-fetched) at this age.
Some people try to defend this movie based on the claim that it is original, unlike the majority of Hollywood films that have been made recently. Boy falls in love with Girl. Boy and Girl have a falling out. Boy is confronted with own mortality and loss. Boy feels stronger than ever about Girl. Boy saves Girl. Boy and Girl confess their love for each other. I rest my case.
The cameraman constantly repeats the same things over and over.
The monster hadn't been to the area where Beth lived when Rob arrived to save her. If it had, the destruction would have been greater. How then, did one building fall to the side to be braced by another building? If the resulting tremors of the monster's actions caused this, isn't it then logical that the second building would have fallen as well? If the building lost the structural integrity at it's base to fall over in the first place, it would have toppled over entirely regardless of the bracing affect of the second building. Of course, this is all hypothetical.
Beth gets impaled, yet can run around once they get out of the building. Adrenaline can only do so much, and can't logically be used as an excuse as she would have been nauseous from blood loss.
The sound effects made by the spawn creatures were laughable at best. Maybe they were meant to be a throwback to older science fiction films and not a theft of them.
When Hud goes to retrieve the camera after miraculously surviving the helicopter crash, the monster "sneaks up on him". To make matters more confusing, all but Hud's head is devoured by a monster that is the size of a skyscraper while Rob and Beth are able to run up and get the camera, that is unscathed, without being touched.
As for the claims of this being an allegory for the 9/11 attacks, that would have to imply that the writer has the capacity to understand such complex ideas as art representing life. This claim is as dumb as the woman who made a list of songs that have no subtextual correlation to anti-American values or in most cases anything violent and having them banned because she believed they reminded victims of the attack.
This list merely scratches the surface of a film that condemned itself to a sub-par story by it's own faulty mechanisms. The use of the first person POV limits the story more than forwards it. The Hitchcock idea of letting the mind draw it's own conclusions leaves this movie desperately wanting. I can formulate some sort of idea as to why the bites from the seedlings cause a person to "explode." I can understand why Rob decided to save Beth. I can even understand why the other three characters decided to go with him, but every explanation for every event throughout the entire film seems entirely too convenient.