So disappointed!

Rating: 2/10 (14 June 2008)

Do not take your children. There were children in this audience and it was very inappropriate. Again...no kids!! First for the good parts. That's the shorter list. M. Night Shyamalan always knows how to build some tension and he did this on occasion in this film. It was well photographed. Now for the disappointing bits. This is a preachy, extreme environmentalist wacko version of the birds. The premise of the problem that the population faces makes no sense. It's obviously written by someone who has no scientific training. I should have known we were in trouble when Mark Wahlberg's character is teaching a class in the beginning and questioning where all the honey bees have gone. The only plausible answer coming from the class was "global warming". By the way, we live on a farm and the honey bees were prolific this year. The film's bloody bits are disgusting and the scene in the zoo looked like a bad remake of the SNL Dan Akroyd/Julia Childs scene. There was one sickening scene of bizarre suicide after another and it became tedious and finally laughable. Yes, there was laughter in the audience as these grotesque scenes were played out in all their slasher splendor. I even heard a "good grief" and a "when will they die" comment from the audience. The characters are so eccentric, in fact downright insane in some cases, that there is no feeling of empathy. It's rather like the author felt the need to show how bad humans are in general. I was tremendously disappointed to have paid the money and wasted the hours. More than one of the comments have indicated that perhaps the people who do not care for this flick "just don't get it". Yeah, we get it. People bad, plants good. Take off on a B movie. Don't destroy the planet, because that will destroy you. Yeah, we get it. It's still a bad attempt at making that message. It's disgusting, it's sophomoric and lacks any scientific expertise one would expect from a middle schooler.