Cloverfield April 24th, 2010
Originally Written 02/03/08
I finally got around to seeing Cloverfield, after missing it for the past couple of weeks due to various circumstances. I saw it with my friend Paul on Friday night. It was pretty cool. It’s definitely Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project and it has some of the problems that the original Blair Witch did as well. The camera work does get shaky at times. I never got dizzy, but there were a few spots where I was ready for it to stabilize.
Also, it had the same trouble with stupid characters doing stupid things, but that’s also kind of the charm of these films. I was getting a little tired of the party banter in the beginning and the monster could’ve showed up a few minutes early. However, once the action got going, I thought the characters worked well. I was chuckling at them at times, but that’s good.
The drama was bare-bones and there wasn’t any character development, but you can’t have that in this type of movie. I also thought the mechanisms they used to drive the drama were fairly effective. Having the footage from an earlier tape the camera was recording over pop into the movie from time to time was an obvious trick, but I liked it.
I liked the first person POV of the camera too. It’s been likened to various video games, which I think is a good analogy. It’s a fantastic and fun ride and I was laughing with joy several times throughout the movie. The action and pacing was quite good and everything worked pretty well.
I really liked the shots of news footage that was used in a few spots of the movie too, which gave just enough needed information, but not heavy exposition to slow it down. I was worried that they wouldn’t show enough of the monster, but there were several nice shots and scenes with monsters that were really cool.
So it wasn’t high art, but it’s a really neat experiment and a successful one at that. It was also just plain fun. I had a good time watching it. Heh, my friend Paul and I had a good laugh when the Statue of Liberty loses its head. “You blew it up! Damn you all to hell!”