After this review in the Times, I doubt I'm going to see it:
http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/movies/18clov.html
Though SthrnCmfrtr's enthusiastic review makes me reconsider...
See, that's what gets me. Movie reviewers are so caught up in everything having to have a message of a certain sort that they completely disregard the effect of the film. If it's not questioning imperialism or consumerism or making sly allusions to
Oedipus at Colonus, they assume it was an idiotic film. "Those idiots didn't even have the good sense to toss in a basic reference to Greek drama! I can't control my rage!"
I don't think this movie was created to be literary -- and by literary, I mean the "better-read than thou" stuffed-shirt arrogance of small writers trying to link stale chewing gum to the infinite mysteries of time and space. I believe the creators were more interested in the most fundamental aspects of human life -- fear and love. They create a situation with (basically) six people with complex relationships, with infatuation and friendship and siblinghood and self-sacrificing romantic love and so forth, and then they destroy those bonds one by one until all that is left of these relationships is a memory. Some new relationships are established over the course of the film, but they too are destroyed.
That is what growing old and dying is, really -- it's what all life is. Rob's decision to go back into the city (and the decision of others to accompany him) is to fight against something larger than him, something impossible to beat, not because of reason or duty but because of his emotions. That the others accompany him is similarly not an act of honor or duty (and certainly not self-interest or reason) but again love.
Politics and Freudianism? Who gives a **** about politics or Freudianism? Would this movie be more satisfying if a giant penis were slithering around the streets of Manhattan, or if the monster was distinctly vaginal? Hey, how about if a character was a bullying swine until the leading lady symbolically castrates him by ripping the cigar out of his mouth and putting it in the garbage disposal? Wouldn't that just be amazingly Freudian? Or if someone says "hey, I bet this monster expected that they would be greeted as liberators! Har har har!" Or if the monster grunted "Mission Accomplished!"
Because, you know, that would make this film
so much more intelligent.
Critics are idiots, admittedly often with college degrees, whose chief danger is that they infect others with their disarmingly attractive idiocy.
I won't guarantee that any given person should go out and watch this movie and expect to be thrilled like I was. Hell, I'm completely baffled that some people apparently liked
Lost in Translation, which I thought was extraordinarily well-acted but completely vacuous. Taste is taste, and not much else matters.
I do think that calling it a stupid film is unwarranted, and I think critiquing it for having buildings fall down in New York is the worst kind of reactionary crap. That's all I'm saying.
Although, getting to see Chris Evans almost nude is one good thing it has going for it. 
