I was AMAZED at how much I disliked it...am I alone?
I like superhero movies; I like high-school dramas. I'm down with the found footage technique, though I think it's over-rated. I watched this film with a friend who has similar tastes. We kept cringing, and around the beer pong scene, were actually curling up on the couch in physical suffering over how much this movie sucked. I really feel like I'm close enough to the target demographic...although apparently I'm just getting out of touch.
It's like the screenwriters designed the characters--emo loser, philosophical type, and popular jock--and then hired whoever wrote the MTV remake of Skins to write all three of them. All three characters talked the same way, all the time. Matt's character in particular was the mostly poorly written "philosophical type" I've ever seen in a High School movie; he had no insights and could rarely form an articulate sentence. Andrew's character arc had some promise; his home life was genuinely disturbing, but having it end with him hurling school buses and patrol cars through the air was the ultimate cop-out to generic action, strangely anti-climactic amidst all of the effects.
In-as-much as the movie has a "message," it seems to be that if you're an abused, disturbed teenager, letting out your anger by killing hundreds of people doesn't make you a bad person because after all, you're an abused and disturbed teenager. Imagine this: a movie about one of the Columbine killers which ends with one of their friends in Tibet saying, "you're not a bad person. I'll do better. I'll help people..." Of course he's a bad person, and so is Andrew. The script is so under-baked when it comes to morality and motivation that it rams down our throats the idea that Andrew's actions are somehow inevitable and more his friends fault than his own, since they didn't love him in the way that he wanted.
Two scenes I liked: playing at the store with their powers (the shopping cart, etc.), and when Andrew beats up the bullies, there's a the moment when he's twirling their inert bodes, possible their corpses, around on the pavement, almost using their hair as paintbrushes to smear the blood on the street. Now THAT was compelling sh-t, most disturbing image in the movie by far.
I dunno...I guess the point of this post is to ask a simple question: Did anyone else just really basically hate the movie, mostly because of how annoying and one dimensional the characters were? Or am I just completely missing something?