I have the feeling this is going to turn into a bit of rant, so if at any point my contrarian opinion starts to bore you, I completely understand. For my part, I still haven't managed to make it all the way through the Pan's Labyrinth commentary.
I think the film is a clever celebration of all sorts of horror films, it includes the good ideas and the dumb ones that accompanied those films.
My problem is that I don't think that this movie is as clever as the writers clearly thought it was, so the accompanying dumb ideas are just frustrating. And I wouldn't say that the dumb ideas I have a problem with are the result of bad horror film tropes. I know the guys kind of avoided defending the Purge by basically saying that regardless of how little sense it makes, it was such a great payoff that it's easily overlooked. But for me, it was symptomatic of how little thought was put into the mechanics of this universe. It's ridiculous, no one would design the elevators to go straight to the lobby like that, and if you can't think of a better way to get all of your monsters into the third act, then perhaps you should spend more than three days working on your script.
By the end of the movie, I didn't feel like I had any idea how this world was supposed to work on a good day, why it failed this time, or why I should care. This is the crux of why the Control Room scenes don't really work for me.
The characters themselves, I didn't like. They seem so cartoonish and cause such a tonal shift from the action in the cabin that it's almost like I'm watching a completely different movie. I understand the poor folks on the IMDB discussion boards who felt like the Control Room scenes got in the way. Sitterson and Hadley aren't real characters; they are occasionally witty but always unpleasant mouthpieces for a system that is irredeemably awful. Watching their banter wasn't fun for me. If either of them had actually been likable or if the Daniel Truman character had gotten more development than "stern, disapproving black guy standing in the corner" I might've cared, but as it was I could never get invested. Not to mention the fact that their constant presence killed the tension and suspense during every single scare.
But in addition to not liking the people in the Control Room, almost everything that happens there is really, really stupid. They're able to micro-manipulate every situation, down to using a pheromone mist and artificial moonlight to encourage sexy funtime between Curt and Jules and later on a single whiff of gas gets Curt to say and do the exact opposite of what he'd said half a second earlier. But despite the fact that we're told the kids must die in a specific order, the Control Room doesn't actually have direct control over the monsters and Jules getting killed first is basically just dumb luck. And despite the fact that we see that there are night-vision cameras all over the woods, they somehow completely miss the fact that Marty survived his attack. And despite the fact that Marty has to die before Dana or the whole thing is fucked, they send in a bunch of guards who randomly start shooting up the lobby where both Dana and Marty are hiding. The whole thing was just baffling to me.
Also, Sigourney Weaver's cameo at the end was just incredibly pointless. We are never given any reason to suspect that these kids might turn on each other just because some random woman they've never met before told them to. Sure, she's a badass, but given that she apparently works for this organization that has brutally slain three of their friends, I find it unlikely that Marty or Dana would take her words to heart. The fact that Dana considers shooting Marty for even a second is the best evidence yet that her character was clearly the Fool the whole time. Overall, the finale felt lackluster and more than a little obvious even though they chose to end the world. It takes a special talent to make the end of the world boring.
So, the failure of this movie isn't that it had some bad ideas. It brought all of these movie tropes together, but they couldn't think of anything really noteworthy to do with them. In my opinion, this movie fails because it took a halfway decent concept and ran with it, seemingly with no place to go.
