DannyNeil

This show may have survived its hackneyed scripts and boring premise had it cast a great actress as its lead.

This show was going to live or die by the acting ability of the lead actress to make us forget the bad lines and get us interested in her character.

Instead we got Jessica Alba...

Jessica Alba who seems to think that pouting is the highest form of acting.

Jessica Alba who seems to think grimacing is what expressiveness is all about.

Jessica Alba who is so needful of acting lessons she even dragged down Michael Weatherly's acting into the cellar.

Shame on James Cameron for thinking that a Hot Chick is all that was needed for this show.

Someone with talent and soul is what was needed.

J.J. Abrams is part of that generation of TV producers that thrive on empty hype. After all, he is the "brain" behind the empty fashion show that was Alias.

So it's no wonder that this time he has embraced that scourge of good film-making: the shaky-cam.

What's really mind-boggling is that he's trying to pass that bad gimmick as something original.

It's not original. It's been done before. A hundred times at least. And guess what? It doesn't work. It never worked. Every single pseudo-documentary I have ever seen completely failed because of the "pseudo" part. You have to try so hard to give a fake sense of documentary that your whole movie reeks of Fake.

J.J. Abrams' movie is exactly like that, except with intentionally bad camera-work.

That Hollywood thinks J.J. Abrams has the slightest talent and made a film like Cloverfield may be the best indictment of current Hollywood.