I’ll keep this review brief like the last. It’s a monster movie thriller, set in New York City, filmed in a Blair-Witch-home-movie style. We catch glimpses of the monsters once in a while. Mostly we are bombarded by images and sounds of their handiwork. The movie starts off with a going-away party thrown for some yuppie by a bunch of his yuppie friends. Then the attack hits. Chaos ensues. We feel the ground shake, see explosions. Then out on the streets we see the Statue of Liberty’s head fly through the air and slam to a rolling stop down the street. And there’s a love story tying the events of the movie together and driving the main character on. The character I found the most interesting and likable, though, was the main character’s friend (his brother’s girlfriend), Lily Ford, played by a lovely young woman named Jessica Lucas who appeared to me to be of Indian descent or maybe part black. The character was stronger (mentally) and more thoughtful than the main character’s love interest.
Warning! Be careful: If you get headaches and nauseous easily, you might want to avoid this movie. The hand-held camera technique, combined with all the running around, screams and explosions, and falling down, has been known to cause this (and even, I’ve heard, vomiting). It certainly gave my wife a headache and made her nauseous.
There are ample things to criticize in such a movie – obvious ones – but I’ll skip over them. It was good entertainment, and an interesting and risky camera-style approach to monster movies. But it’s too jarring and shallow for me to watch it again I think. The New York Times is typically clueless and hypersensitive about the movie, of course, and gets some facts wrong to boot.
Now – Star Trek XI: The teaser trailer was just that – a tease. You’ll learn next to nothing by watching it. In fact, you’ll get far more info from checking out the IMDB page on the movie coming out in Christmas of this year. Apparently, it will be revisiting the original series crew with an early career adventure. The cast is interesting, to say the least, and I’m none too sure if I’m happy with it. Time will tell. Possible positive notes: the director is J.J. Abrams, who produced Cloverfield, and the screen play is by the same guys who wrote the Transformers screen play (see my review here).
Geoffrey is an Aristotelian-Libertarian political philosopher, writer, editor, and web designer. He is the founder of the