Reviews

Like so many have pointed out, this film tries to be more than it is. Derivative of so many better films it meanders along trying so hard to shock but ultimately it falls flat.

The killings: we get that he manipulated and killed the posh folk - so why does the film do this 'shock' reveal of him putting a nail in the tyre, drugging the bottle, sending an email, providing the razors .... It would have been more interesting to leave us wondering.

People died but where were the police investigators? A little too simplistic for artistic effect!

The film flip flops between drama, comedy, thriller - not being good at any of them.

I wanted to like the main actor but as the film progressed I found him less and less convincing and likeable. I have no problem with male nudity in films but even I was irritated by the last scene as it was just trying too hard to be like American Psycho or something...

Another recent poor movie to put on the wasted opportunity pile...

Very derivative of other better alien films. Once Pratt bonded with his daughter as she read her science encyclopaedia I knew she would inevitably turn up in the future (John Connor style). Borrowed from Independence Day: everyman character with military experience saves world. Blatant rip off of Alien space ship design complete with cockpit and pilots! Why send thousands of people back to be slaughtered by aliens as they try to use bullets to kill them? Perhaps the final thing the people from the future should have announced in that football stadium is: "...and by the way, bullets are not an effective way to kill them!" They could have spent 30 years coming up with a solution.

This barely kept me engaged - some of the scenes looked good. The aliens design was good - if similar to others... Something about these Hollywood films just being done by committee drains them of substance. I'm all for a big dumb blockbuster but you need to be made to care about the characters and not be distracted by plot holes....

I didn't expect to like this but found it engaging, eerie at times and the scene with the truck quite moving.

I read this book way back when it first came out. I loved the book and the scene when Gage dies has always stuck with me - the way it is mixed with a dream and the realisation it wasn't a dream. The way Stephen King depicted the horror of that sort of loss - I can imagine what it would be like waking up to the horror of the reality of losing a child.

I liked the decision to change it to Ellie coming back as she was able to provide a better performance than a toddler zombie which I think came across as quite unintentionally comical the first film. I liked the uneasy sense the father has as his daughter is not quite what she was meant to be. That bed scene was eerie...with them both lying there.

I loved the cat in this film and the way the cat came back and caused Ellie's death in a way.

I didn't like the bits with the disabled sister - portraying her as a monster felt wrong in the book and both films and I don't think it really added much.

When I first watched the first film I was disappointed but with this one I thought on the whole it worked better.

I was intrigued to see this - the idea of Kidman wielding a machine gun interested me somehow. Sadly she was not convincing. The makeup (as many here have said) was a distraction. She looked like a zombie most of the time. Was she meant be be on Crystal meth? If so that was not clear at all. At one point when she was portraying a younger version of her character she had freckles that honestly looked like someone had plonked them over her face evenly spaced with a felt tip. The hair and makeup in this film were terrible. The relationship with her daughter was hollow - at various times she managed to get her daughter to meet her and then proceeded to not really say anything to her. If I was the daughter I'd leave too. What was she doing out in the snow? In the script the daughter refers to her childhood which she can't remember even though it wasn't that long ago - this just made me think that the character's backstories on the whole were not developed properly so you felt nothing for anyone. A real shame Nicole could not pull this off. As others have said - this was miscast - she was just not believable.