I can’t imagine how painful it must have been to watch this in a theater.

It’s an interesting filmmaking experiment: what if you made a big-budget Blair Witch? Well, it would fail in the same way the original did: I don’t see how anyone could ever care about those characters. It’s not just that the “realism” conflicts with our expectations about what we’re gonna see in a movie; the problem is that the movie techniques we’re expecting have a purpose — they show us several perspectives and emphasize certain moments so that ten minutes of surprise-party footage allow us to know much more about the characters than we just would by spending ten minutes in the party, or watching the beginning of Cloverfield.

Not that the director made it easy for himself: the decision to use unknown actors, as obvious as it sounds when you’re developing the concept, actually harms it; using recognized faces would create the connection that’s missing between the audience and the characters (that’s what famous actors are for). And I don’t understand why Hud has to be the most obnoxious character in the whole cast (not to mention a poor acting performance). Sure, you’ve got to be an asshole to be dutifully carrying a camera around while the city around you is destroyed; but I really don’t think that would be the kind of asshole who screams OH MY GOOOOOD at the top of his prepubescent lungs every two seconds, among many other things that made me want to slap my screen.

Plus, the girlfriend rescue plan is completely unbelievable. And the monster’s ugly. Which I would probably put in the “pros” column if I enjoyed the movie, because designers don’t usually go for the truly repulsive, gross (lack of) aesthetics.