Absolutely awful

I had to laugh at your attempt to sound clever,ganubis.
Ubiquity is the wrong word for your statement I'm afraid. Ubiquitous, means being everywhere at once,or omnipresent if you like,as in a God. You obviously searched
for what you thought was a good word but only succeeded in making yourself look silly! A tip,the word prevalence,would have been a better choice.
Keep studying the dictionary and learning new words,nothing wrong with that,just be sure to check the definitions carefully before posting.

I'll throw my hat in, I guess.

1. The acting was, in my opinion, very poor. At times I wondered if the film was done with a shooting script or if large segments were improv. There were quite a few moments where characters repeated words within a sentence, such as 'but', which is something you tend to see in actors who are inexperienced at doing ad-lib or improv.

2. At first I was puzzled as to whether or not the film was a mockumentary. Tonally, it plays out rather unevenly from start to finish. What I assume were supposed to be horrific shots of sea lice eating their way through people's flesh were frankly silly looking, though this could be in part due to my dislike of CGI and preference for practical special effects. The scene where Stephanie's husband dies as a friend watches on in 'horror' was particularly laughable, IMO. As an aside, there were no characters I could identify with, which is key for me as a viewer.

3. The ecological angle this film takes is nothing new, Jaws did it best and basically wrote the template for eco-horror. Natural predator threatens to ruin a town's celebration, there is a coverup so that festivities continue, the predator rears its ugly head and lots of people die. We do get a shout out to sharks in the beginning, but the culprit is...a rash? Nope, an isopod. Okay, fine, but I've seen this movie before. It's also called Ants, Piranha, Kingdom of the Spiders, Grizzly, Alligator, Great White, etc. I could go on, but why?

4. Character motivation is unclear. Why is the American oceanographer so routinely rude to his French peer? Why do Stephanie and her husband walk through an obviously empty town, filled with dying people, a newborn infant in tow? Why doesn't the doctor realize the trouble is isopods earlier? He's been amputating body parts all day long, as we see in one pointed shot of an entire leg being placed in a trash bag. Why is there a recurrent theme of characters 'looking good' on camera and redoing takes or being concerned about their place within the in-film camera frame?

5. The perfect storm of events which lead to the (chicken crap, radiation, dead zones in the bay) isopods becoming able to eat people from the inside out smacked of extreme contrivance and cheap storytelling for me. Others may have enjoyed it. I did not.

I watched the whole film but I found it to be one of the worst films I've seen in a long time. My absolute astonishment that Barry Levinson had made this dreck was what kept me watching. I rated it a three, which I think is being generous.

I like films from both the high and low ends of the spectrum, and I tend to enjoy found footage as well as gory horror as well as whatever happens to be showing on TCM on any given evening, but this was just bad.

It seemed to me that there were abortive attempts to call back to older films--the sweet but soon hardened by events female reporter from [REC] and later the original Dawn of the Dead, when the policeman goes into the house to see the people being eaten alive from within and ends up killing them (and his partner) echoed the SWAT team of Roger and Peter in the housing project. Donna's face being covered in blood from the body above her recalled 28 Days Later. Again, I could go on, but why?

People did foolish things for foolish reasons (one of my least favorite horror film 'tricks') and the resolution was flat and boring.

In my opinion.

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"It's better not to know so much about what things mean." David Lynch

I truly have to agree that it was awful.

And to respond specifically to T-eschberger, I'll give you some reasons as to why I was so let down (taken from a review I just submitted):

The main issue with the film is that it has no guidance, and feels very unfocused and confused. The only way to describe it is to say that it felt like Levinson shot about 6 different found-footage movies, then haphazardly cobbled and condensed them together into a single 84 minute release the weekend before this film's premier.

Nothing in this movie organically works or leads into anything else. The lack of a narrative focus leaves us following a seemingly random array of characters who all receive little-to-no establishment or development. And because none of these characters actually are associated with each other, the film constantly has to cut between their stories in a jarring manor, relying on very lazy on-screen graphics and some hilariously poor voice-over narration to try and bridge the gaps. And the real kicker is that the only character who more-or-less feels like a "lead" (Donna the reporter) actually leaves the movie before the final act, forcing us to have to follow the almost ancillary character of Stephanie. (Well, Donna continues her poor narration, but she's no longer in the "found footage", which makes her feel wholly unneeded in the movie at all)

There's no real pacing to be had, and to make matters worse, the overall "loose storyline" is constantly interrupted by small vignettes focusing on various townspeople, which takes away crucial time that could have otherwise been spent developing the story and characters. It feels childish and aggravating to sit through.

Asides from the abysmal storytelling, the production has too many flaws to ignore. The acting is uniformly poor, particularly from Kether Donohue, who is our sort of "narrator." She comes off poorly and is far too monotone to really convey the emotions intended. Other actors range from forgettably bad to just plain foul.

The music (which like the storytelling is jarring due to this being a "found footage" movie, a sub-genre which typically doesn't include orchestral scores) is forgettable.

The editing will give you whiplash.

The effects are laughable at times, featuring a mixture of decent gross- out gore prosthetics with amateruish CGI.

And the sound mixing is just... plain... awful. The background sound effects (screaming, gunshots, etc.) are all stock sounds we've heard hundreds of times before, and they cheapen the entire film. I used to take a video- production class in High School, and I am telling the truth that many of the sound effects they used in this film were taken from royalty-free music libraries that my school had. It was painful hearing them in a film by someone as notable as Barry Levinson.

The film somehow felt simultaneously over-written and under-written. The best found-footage films typically focus not on a complex narrative, but rather strictly follow a group of characters reacting to a situation. Cannibal Holocaust, The Blair Witch Project and the original Paranormal Activity were so well-received (we're ignoring personal views, I'm talking general reception) because they were effective in following a simple storyline with focus almost exclusively on characters we care and/or relate to. The Bay feels like Levinson was actively trying to make an epic found-footage film and devoted too much time to developing a complex storyline and plot, as well as a wide network of characters to follow, and it just conflicted with the style so badly. It betrayed the characters by being too epic for it's style (hence the lack of focus mentioned above) and additionally came off as hokey and feeling fundamentally unreal.

And FURTHERMORE, this is my signature! SERIOUSLY! Did you think I was still talking about my point?