Cloverfield-Movie Review-Blair Witch meets Godzilla meets 9/11-Grade B

Posted by Martin:

Movie Grade: B

This movie is on my list of movies to see in 2008.

Small video cameras have single handedly created a whole new genre, it began with The Blair Witch Project and is growing here with Cloverfield.

Cloverfield tells the story of a group of partying friends, who experience together the attack of an apparent alien monster upon New York City.

For the first 45 minutes I thought I was watching a true masterpiece, but as the intensity of the action continued to build the fallacy of the small camera documentary idea began to show it's limitations and it begins to distract from the story.  Unlike Blair Witch where the camera is shared by different people, Cloverfield is 95% shot by one person, and by the end this character is running from large spiders and trying to cross a building's roof, and dragging a body from a crash, all while holding a small video camera.  Also whoever made the video camera, made the toughest piece of consumer equipment on the planet.  It survives falls, crashes, alien attacks, and bomb explosions.  I guess because I am a cameraman I think about these things.

But the first 45 minutes are true genius.  The first sign of the monster comes out of no where, just as it would in real life.  In the middle of a crisis of such proportions it would be chaos, and you may not clearly see what is happening, which in all honesty is much more frightening than already knowing what the monster looks like.

We are apparently far away enough from 9/11 that visual references to that day are no longer taboo in a movie.  Spiderman 1 couldn't have a trailer with the Twin Towers in it, but this movie has an almost directly lifted shot from the 9/11 doc those two French guys shot.   I guess if a monster did attack New York it would look a little like 9/11.  In fact one of the working titles for the movie was 1-18-08, as is shown in the poster above.  (Although the movie takes place on May 23...it really never was 1-18)

In the end though having characters focus on carrying a camera around while death falls all around detracts from a truly frightening story.

Comments

[homer]

This is total crap. the worst film I have seen in a long time. How very sad that the same guy can make a brilliant TV series like Lost then produce this shite. Oh well lets hope that he dosnt introduce the same style of rubbish no story and cam corder filming into Lost, I mean please It just Godzilla done on a really poor budget, It would have been better if the monster had really been a person in a monster suit and at the end he unzipped his suit and Britney Spears , mind you both monster and Britney are pretty ugly. in summery dont waste youre money save it for a decent movie