Don't see it.

Rating: 3/10 (26 December 2008)

Sure, Manhattan has its share of young party-goers, but now we know all New Yorkers are in their 20s, allowing a photogenic cast (whose characters lead boring lives and are annoying enough to have you hoping they die deaths that are as excruciatingly painful as their farewell party -- an exercise in human drabness -- that the film opened with). And to add to the torture: yuppies using colloquialisms that left the ghetto decades ago. So, sorry, director, the intentional over-lameness backfired severely.
Jason's nicely-complected girlfriend Lisa takes the Looks honors but the only skin shots we get are of her legs, with contrasting white high-heels that she sports in half the movie.
It's conceivable that this would be truly terrifying to post-9/11 New Yorkers; that there would be real suspense in the initial possibility that whatever this was, it was caused by terrorists who might follow with other forms of attack. I'd left the room four times during the "party," and after the first explosion, we thought this was going to be a killer movie. Until we saw how mundane the terrorist actually was -- a huge crustacean that spits meteors and sheds man-eating cockroaches.
Some of the sounds added to the film's terror and scariness, like the first attack explosions, the weird baby monster sounds, and the mother monster's bellowing, anguished King Kongish sounds.
The messianic alpha-male hero Rob was peppered throughout the movie with inane questions by his friends who find it so difficult to see or think for themselves, it's no wonder they haven't been invited to be non-Japanese-speaking 24-year-old American VPs in Japan, like Rob. Amazing is the lemming-like behavior that compels them first to try to walk in the dead of night across the bridge (at the urging of authorities -- a 9/11 slam) into Brooklyn whose residents would no doubt welcome a team of Manhattan yuppies with open arms, until Mama Monster attacks the bridge. They then follow Rob back through swarming subway rats and baby monsters, past evacuees going in the opposite direction as fast as they can, to Ground Zero where the monster thrashes skyscrapers, so they can climb across crumbling roofs of skyscrapers leaning at dangerous angles, just to rescue Rob's girlfriend, lovely Beth, who's able to skedaddle just fine -- what's a little impalement?
But the badge of courage goes to the Marlena (Lizzy Caplan) who in a toasted state can swing an ax like A-rod and knocks a monster off Rob's back -- in the process having three-inch chunks of skin removed from her torso by another monster. She unflinchingly applies dressings to them (we all know how easy it is to find clean paper towels and bottled water in subway tunnels!), only asking if the wounds look unattractive. She stoically toughs it out through exposed wounds and dizzy spells until she perishes in a glorious explosion of her own blood.
The DVD's Features reveal Caplan to be brighter and much wittier than the others. She was nominated for a Supporting Actress award. Some of her acting is kind of cool and she seems the only one to portray the depths of their fear and utter despondency, as they rest in the subway with the hope starting to drain out of them. Marlena uses facial expressions well. Hud, trying to hit on her, gets superb disinterested expressions from her. During a lull in the film's questionable dialog, the effects of the sustained assault on the senses and fatigue from the raw terror are spoken in one glazed look at Hud.
But no one seems to have the chance to build on her acting. Some of the improv from Hud, who fashions himself a comedian in real life, was distinctly unfunny, and I wonder if this wasn't the film's worst setback. If his character's intent was to annoy, it succeeded.
The hand-held cam shots are overdone to the point of ridiculousness. This loses the desired realism. It makes a lot of people nauseous and dizzy, or, in my case, caused me to focus just on the DVD subtitles or close my eyes. Even the classic Bourne films used "hand-helds," but judiciously and tastefully. And mostly on shots that couldn't be taken otherwise. Without the shaky video I would have given this film a 4 -- it IS a monster movie. Without the party, a 5.
It's hard to pull off the concept of "the medium is part of the message" without boring, so we could have had much less of the videotaping parts. Hud, the one doing the taping, could have sounded less like a ten-year-old.
But the flashback playback of the videotape being made over an old tape of Rob and Beth DID sort of work. This allows us glimpses of parts that hadn't been completely taped over while watching the movie itself during the military's "presentation" of the recovered tape (whose magnetic domains are immune to NEMP). The last flashback completed the depiction of the once-sweet but shallow relationship between Rob and Beth, and was the vehicle to the film's ending, where, juxtaposed after Rob saying, "If you're seeing this I'm dead," is Beth at Coney Island the month previous, full of life, and saying ironically, "I had a good day."
What the film lacked was dialog, screenplay, suspense, real emotion, and character and relational development. Cheers for the shots of military action and first responders which looked fairly credible. Pretty decent CGI rats or fake human legs because I don't think the actors would have supported those fat, real ones running between their legs. The plot was only mildly interesting -- trying to flee Manhattan, rescuing Beth, then trying to leave again.
FYI, if one can't take hand-held action found in films a refund is normally available at theaters only within the first few minutes of the film.