It is during the early stages of the mounting threat that the most egregious narrative mistakes happen. The knowledge possessed by our heroes seems to make fast leaps of logic and the audience is left in the dark as to how they came to possess such information. Kidman's Bennell would go off to do something, get a little bit of new info, return to the base, and the others already knew what she had just uncovered. What is going on here? It is as if the concept of an expository script and narrative flow were thrown out the window in favor of a quick creepy scene. The movie had a rather concise running time of 90 minutes, but there was no reason why we couldn't have gotten another 10-20 minutes of footage to flesh out what was there. I am sure it would have greatly improved the movie's logic.
Then there is the inclusion of these flashbacks that are supposed to remind us of what has happened before. Why? Do you have that little respect for your audience that we can't remember what happened for more than thirty minutes? These bits really got under my skin.
Still, the sequences of Bennell's dawning realization and some of the set pieces of her trying to blend in with those already taken were successful at creating some suspense. Kidman's work was not that bad, although she did have this manner of swaying as she walked that seemed a little unnatural to begin with. Perhaps she was replaced prior to the making of the movie?
The end result is a movie that, while somewhat entertaining, does not know what it wants to be or what it wants to say. There are references to Iraq and how humanity is defined by violence, although I am not sure what it was really trying to say about that. As for its genre feel, it mashed action, horror, and drama in alternating bits that did not gel with one another.
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