I wasn't too fond of the cute twentysomething yuppies. I was hoping to see them all die. They had way too much screen time.
I was fond of the monster. It was cool. But we didn't get a glimpse of it until fifteen or twenty minutes in, and even then, they just kept teasing us with it. It wasn't actually shown to us until the end of the movie.
There were a few exciting/suspenseful sequences, but this felt a lot like the 1998 Godzilla (the execrable American one): too much people talking and running, not enough monster destruction. In a Japanese monster movie, Godzilla emerges, fucks shit up, then leaves, and *then* the humans show up and start planning retaliation (generals strategize, mad scientists scheme, pilots prepare to deploy crazy new experimental vehicles, et cetera). So you've got your fill of the beast, and you're ready to see people strike back.
The shaky cam was annoying, and I felt kind of ripped off by the way that we never got the glory shots that you expect in this kind of movie -- monster eats people, monster fights military, monster tosses cars around. Lots of people who have seen the movie still can't tell you exactly what it looks like.
Compared to The Host (an excellent monster movie from Korea), this is a big old 'meh'. Had I known, I would have waited for Cloverfield to come out on DVD.
In brief, I went to a monster movie, but what they gave me was Dawson's Creek.