Emperor's new clothes

Rating: 1/10 (22 February 2008)

Spoilers... Really now, what's to spoil? Story lines don't come any thinner than this. Synopsis: Huge monster appears out of nowhere, destroys city, everybody dies, the end. There isn't any sense of commitment to the main characters, who after the random, gratuitous intro spend their time running around screaming. There is no suspense, no explanation, no point. Predictably, the full view of the monster is saved for last, when even the appalling camera work (yes, I KNOW it's intentional) can't disguise the mediocre CGI, nor the lack of inspiration among the monster-designers. Equally predictable, the nasty foot-soldiers it drops look like big spiders  contact with which will make you feel ill and eventually reduce you to an Alien-plagiarism. One does wonder why American filmmakers are so eager to destroy their big cities, especially after 9/11 has provided us with bone chilling imagery that will make any movie of this kind look silly in comparison for decades to come. Not just silly, actually; the way 9/11-like images are opportunistically recycled in this cinematic non-event struck me as rather tasteless. A BBC reviewer quite rightly called it 'plain 9/11 porn'. The makers have worked under the false assumption that 'live', shaky camera-work in dark surroundings will lift it all to a high level of hip artistry, but really, all it does is give you a headache. Any inexperienced klutz suffering from advanced Parkinson would get steadier handycam images than the guy supposedly holding the thing during these exasperating 75 minutes. It's all a very poor Blair Witch rip-off. Add to that the prevailing darkness and half the time you simply haven't got a clue what you're looking at: as a viewer, I felt insulted. This isn't 'intriguing' or 'artistic' or 'novel', it's just sheer, lax arrogance. Avoid at all costs.