(This review may contain spoilers).
Although there were some parts of this movie that had potential, I didn’t really feel it lived up to the first movie.
I didn’t get as confused with the characters as I did with the first film, which gave the impression that this movie was more scripted, rather than the improvisation that seemed to exist in the first movie.
I felt that this movie severely lacked in subtlety. It didn’t generate the same feelings of fear of the unseen as the previous movie did… and it lost quite a bit of the fear it generated when it showed the violence, rather than leaving it to the viewers’ imagination.
I felt that the camera was a bit disjointed, especially seeing as it seemed to randomly switch between the different cameras used by different characters.
I thought there was a lot in this movie that didn’t seem to really go anywhere, like the time disorientation. And one of the violent things that happened was really quite stupid and didn’t really seem to be used for anything other than a jump scare.
There were a few link-ins to the original movie that were good to see, but I was disappointed in this movie. The atmosphere didn’t really seem to make a lot of sense and although it was good to see James was a paramedic, I had no idea what the other characters did… or how the four of them could just randomly camp in the woods. There were references made to the history, but not a whole lot explored.
I didn’t find most of this movie particularly scary and I felt there were too many characters and not enough detail about them and how they related to each other. I wasn’t all that concerned with what was happening to them… and for most of the film, I felt they were making appallingly bad choices.