Just a cash cow

Rating: 2/10 (10 February 2008)

Interesting to note all bad reviews of this movie have a "SPOILERS" warning. Intriguing at least. No spoilers on this comment.
Anyway, this movie is based on one sole concept JJ Abrams used on Lost: mystery&hype. The idea is not telling all the details, but instead fuel hype by letting viewers catch small implanted scenes and start a buzz around them.
This is not bad, if the content is truly good. Lost lived to the expectations most of the time. But this movie was not as well thought out as lost was.
Seems like the plan was to build up money by making a cheap blockbuster. They saved on famous actors, saved on film and lighting and everything a real camera work demands. Saved a lot -- movie only cost 25m to make. Built a lot of hype using the old trick of the "what's that?" ad plus really cheap internet buzz.
That all means this movie was really planned as a cash cow.
As all this took most of the thinking time of the production crew, there was not time left to develop likable characters. No time left to think about a reasonable reason for panic. So a monster was used. No time left to think about a story. There are tons of stories to tell on an incredible setting as a monster demolishing the crap out of New York. This movie only has people running around.
Characters were stereotypical. All party goers and all friends until death. All really freaking panic all the time, so you get screaming all movie duration.
In summary:
1) the movie gets points by being different. We hope there are more movies which do not tell the audience what is going on word by word.
But:
2) story+characters+script is dumb. The production had to expend to much time thinking how to build up hype and had no time to build a story or a good script.