Spoilerfield.

People who know me know that my media intake is choosy to the point of veganism, and that I steer clear of anything that sets off my internal spoiler sense. Oftentimes to a degree that sees me become obnoxious in conversation. That said, I won't give anything away here in case you've got as much invested in it as I did before I saw it.

Whether or not you enjoyed this movie, you've got to admit that most of the excitement built up for it (and thus, most of the revenue) is due to the ballsy marketing campaign. Aside from the mysterious trailer that sparked the whole witch hunt, most of the information that trickled in over the months has been word of mouth and spending time on search engines and Wikipedia. When you do your own PI work like that for a movie, it builds up some anticipation and makes you fill in the blanks--indeed, this is why a lot of people were so let down.

Major complaints, as far as I can tell , has been:

It was hard to watch.
Yes. It was. I looked at the fire extinguisher in the theater for a significant amount of time.
It was too much like nine-eleven.
You know what? Just...no. I had a long thing written about this. But people who are going to play that card can just boil in their own irrelevance.
I thought it was going to be about Voltron.
I wish.
I threw up twelve times.
This, in my point of view, is a valid complaint. I only say this because I've considered myself an stalwart inner-ear tank for years. The Descent series of games were my jam when I was younger, and these weeded out many who were fine in normal 3D shooters of the era. The only game that's ever given me vertigo was Zone of the Enders.
It was nothing but nifty, vacuous special effects.
Well, you can take this up with all the people who hated it for the exact opposite reason.
There were no special effects, it was just filmed on a shaky camcorder.
See above.

Let's face it guys. Without the shaky camera, this would have been a lame rehashing of all these infinite "Beautiful People Screaming" movies. Without the nod toward huge Hollywood production effects, it would have been Blair Witch (which I enjoyed tremendously). Sometimes I go to Rotten Tomatoes and read the opposite opinions of mine just to get angry. Far too many critics are subhumans who keep a thesaurus handy, and movie critics are the worst about that. Have you ever wanted, as I have, to be a critic critic? Like, rate movie critics one to five stars, and publish which ones you think make a good point and which ones are empty creatures? I guess it's a living though, so if you can make money doing that, more power to you, or something.

stub | 01.28.08 | Permalink