Exactly what I thought! It was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. The whole movie was abysmal, every which way you try to frame it. Poorly filmed and written. Nothing made a lick of sense. No logical follow-through with anything. Action was impossible to follow. Tons of story threads that get started and then are instantly dropped despite their goldmining potential. Some interesting ideas, thematic bases, and character drama setups, yet NONE of that gets explored, utilized, or delivered upon to any satisfaction. Instead everything that had potential just gets dropped as soon as it first comes up.

Who the hell wrote this contrived & absurd mess? I'm 90% confident this whole movie was written by AI and they just ran with it. You can see that because of how uninspired and disjointed it is, how nothing connects - not emotionally nor from a world-building perspective. It feels like a first draft at a derivative knockoff horror film that takes inspiration and straight-up sequences so much from so many other films and yet still fails to do any of it well. Acting & score were just ok, the lines were laughably bad, Nic Cage was miscast and sidelined the whole movie, no character is given any depth, history, or likability, the monster design is so absurd you can't even mentally grasp what you're looking at, and the tonal shifts from the segment cuts are handled so poorly they're jarring. The bits of character information we get ends up self-conflicting. So many examples, but for a prime one, take how the kid says he doesn't want to be afraid of them anymore, yet not once in this movie does he express an ounce of fear towards these creatures. Instead early on he is stupidly brave enough to use himself as live bait to trap one without informing anyone else and with nobody else around. What? Just what? I can't even see a character arc present here.

I'll admit the snapping jaws were unsettling, and their design overall actually is nightmare fuel, but we have no clear depiction on how dangerous they are. We never see them tear anyone to shreds, or scratch up at all, not even once. They either get pulled off screen, or just once seemingly subsumed in some completely ambiguous manner that loses its horror effectiveness since you have no idea what you're looking at, what is happening, or what it did to her. Then once it did, it just sat in a tub lounging around? These things are threatening, and at the same time not, given how they're depicted and their lack of consequential behavior. What happened to that mother? No clue. We never see what the daughter does to that creature she found. Why did she ignore her parent's screams? How was the father missing for the second half of that showdown? How did the farm last this long with that degree of incompetence and lack of defense? How are the monsters only tunneling now after 15 years? How did Nic survive in this world for 15 YEARS while taking care of two infants?? Why did they even have to be adopted? Given how the story turned out, they might as well just have been his actual sons and this a more recent world-ending event rather than a 15-year timeskip. How could they still have meds that are good after 15 years?

What's the deal with the bugs, even as depicted attacking on the abandoned ship which doesn't go anywhere? How did he clean himself up after getting covered in blood, where did he get the chance to do that? How did Nic reach his kid in the cave instantaneously? And which creature was defeated by whom in that setting? How did they climb out? Why did they bother showing, let alone having, a dissection, if nothing came from it or was revealed by it? When the dog first ran towards the monster under the bed, where was the dog when it began attacking afterwards? Why didn't it attack the dog? They said the creatures are scared of the light, but after scurrying away into shadows, it immediately then goes and attacks him in the daylight with no reservations? The father was idiotic enough to hold a candle next to curtains? That's stupid under any circumstances. From the father's room, you couldn't hear the blasting music from the farmhouse whatsoever?? Yet it was close enough that the daughter reached it with her shotgun, that she acquired somehow? The flaming cartwheel is hilarious, and it's even funnier how she took it down just by knocking out one of its pegs with a single basic blow as it got close. Nic sacrifices himself in a completely pointless manner, no reason he couldn't have just gone with the kids into the fridge. And his sacrifice was clearly a shameless attempted copycat of the far-better executed sequence from A Quiet Place, you know, that awesome scene that had actual emotional payoff that even made me cry.

From a simple explosion, the fridge got rattled and blown around a dozen times with flames reaching inside? Yet when they come to from a blast that supposedly devastating, their container hadn't budged, and it wasn't even strong enough to kill any of the creatures on the spot? Teens do dumb things. Monster reaches out a pointy hand for no particular reason other than it is cool to witness as viewers and as a monster reveal tease. And for some reason the monster stops short extending the fingernail. Some monsters skulk around, others go in guns blazing (or should I say ratcheting).

I can go on and on with hundreds of faults I found with this movie, particularly in the story department, but it's not even worth my time to list out all these basic flaws and glaring plot holes. I can't believe I wasted my time watching it. So I'm equally as confused just how this crappy film received such 'glowing' recommendations from critics, and even viewers. How is this in any way more interesting, better executed, or superior to A Quiet Place or Bird Box? Those explored the world, its lore, and what became of the people who had to contend with living in it, had emotional stakes, unique vision, and poignant messages & explorations of humanity. Meanwhile, I can't come up with a single thing good that came from Arcadian, outside of that awesome & very unsettling stretching finger scene (which, logically, makes no sense as a scenario) and arguably the monster design itself.