Just Didn't Do It For Me

Rating: 7/10 (9 May 2009)

I really wanted to like this movie. I'd heard quite a few good things about it and was really looking forward to watching it, so perhaps that was part of the reason I was disappointed; my expectations were too high.
First off, after just the first 10 minutes of the movie it was glaringly obvious to me which of the women would be the one to survive. Perhaps it's more of a problem with the genre, but when you put some back story into one of the characters but not any of the others, you're christening him or her as the main character, and it's already a given that he or she will survive (if, of course, anyone at all does). Now, normally I wouldn't mind that a whole lot, but the problem here was that I simply did not like Sarah's character. She rubbed me the wrong way from the start, I guess. And it didn't help that she actually killed off the one character I did like (for an absurd reason, no less); I really wanted Juno to live and was hoping against hope the whole time that she would.
Second, from the moment the so-called 'crawlers' appeared on screen, all I could think of was SmÃ©agol from The Lord of the Rings, and let's just say that kinda killed my enjoyment of the film. I appreciate trying to make the creatures somewhat realistic, but I guess it was just bad luck how they turned out... I would have been much happier if the characters had been attacked by giant spiders or something.
Anyways, now that I've let my disappointment out, I'd still rate the film marginally favorably. After all, it was far better than Living Hell or some other such garbage, and I was more let down by my expectations than by the movie itself.