How to Destroy a Good Hard-SF Plot

Rating: 1/10 (11 June 2008)

All that's good lays in the beginning.
At the plot's level. YES, it's smart and paranoid enough to make a movie script out of the idea that nature might restore the balance by making the plants produce an airborne toxin that will short-circuit the human brain's neurotransmitters, reversing the self-protection instincts and thus conducing to self-destruction. Unfortunately, the clever part finishes here, at the premise's level. What could have been a Crichton-like microbiological hard-science-fiction deflates into a primitive hide-and-chase story that fails to evolve into a rigorous structure.
And within the first 15 minutes time-frame. YES, the two opening attacks, in Central Park and in Philly, are not only freaky, but also stylish. I liked especially the dry and cynical way to shoot the suicidal jumps from the scaffolding, and the policeman's gun that follows a deathly course from one person to another. But here is where good cinema ends. Following this, the script becomes illogical and messy, and the direction, although narratively skillful, turns sugary and pathetic (mainly in the didactic shots of hands holding each other, or people staring with huge saucer-eyes, as if trying to convey some tragic "Ooops!"). The ending is boring and anticlimactic, not worth the pain of having followed until then a story that had started so well, only to fail into the most amateurish way.
And worse, the basic plot is TOTALLY illogical, beginning right at the start - for instance: could anyone explain why were those plants giving themselves so much trouble to short-circuit the cerebral neurotransmitters blabla (see above) when it should been incomparably simpler to concoct a toxin able to cause heart failure? Don't forget one of the cardinal rules of the Nature's ways: always go for the simplest solution!