How does this movie keep getting good reviews?

Rating: 3/10 (9 July 2005)

Let me start off saying that i was excited as anyone about this movie. I'm a huge scifi fan, and even badly directed and poorly acted (any feature on the SciFi channel) movies i enjoy.
This movie was so bad, as to completely eclipse the worst giant snake movie the scifi channel has ever decided to force on the public. Yea sure, the special effects were great, but thats expected of any big budget film.
Everyone is raving about Dakota fanning, and i spent the whole movie hoping she would die in a terrific fireball, or at least be strangle to death by Tom Cruise. Constant questions, hysterical outbreaks, and generally the most annoying character in a movie. Think Jar Jar Binks, without being remotely funny.
Justin Chatwins character is only moderately believable as well. Wanting revenge, he keeps trying to join the army. Why is it though, that every teenage boy has to be a complete punk, disrespecting parents, loud headphones, and just a general reject? So the ideal TV family might not exist, but that doesn't mean it has to be completely dysfunctional.
The reactions in the movie are either slow, or completely wrong. When the earth quake around the hole starts, no one tries to run. Even as the monster is coming up, barely anyone tries to run. Tom Cruise makes a point, early in the movie, of placing a gun in the back of his pants. Yet when his family and wellbeing are threatened, he takes a full 5 minutes to even pull the gun out, then promptly loses it. Later, for some reason a crowd of hundreds, even thousands, is held off a boat by maybe a dozen army guys. Facing certain death if they stay where they are, these people aren't gonna force there way over the army guys? Come on. I've seen bigger riots over Pokemon.
I was glad to see the army realistically portrayed. Being a soldier myself, little things like the speech each Javalin gunner gets before firing, really strike home. But why is there no escalation of force? Brigade after brigade march to their doom, and the tactics never change. Throughout the entire movie, there is no mention of nuclear weapons, the Navy is sadly missing, and air assets seem to be the only step in the right direction. Still, the artillery fire sounded scarily realistic, even if the special effects team still likes to make explosions full of fire instead of debris.
Now, i can see the film maker, at the end of the movie, wanting a happy ending. But how does the entire family survive, and Boston as a whole, remain untouched? And when you get to the end of the movie, shouldn't there be some kind of explanation for some the the things that happened? Why were these machines buried? Why didn't these creatures take the planet when the machines were buried? Whats with the red blood vine stuff? Why do the shields go down? Why did i pay to see this movie? WTF? Thats almost exactly what went though my mind, and anyone after watching this movie, doesn't say out loud, WTF? I think needs professional help.