Cloverfield

I've been sitting here with this page open all freaking day- ALL DAY- trying to figure out what I want to say about Cloverfield (2008), which I finally saw approximately 7000 years after everyone else did. Why is this so difficult? Maybe because I'm terribly distracted today. Maybe it's because I simply don't feel like writing a review for it because I just kind of thought it was okay.

That's the point in this venture, by the way, where you chime in with "Well, if you don't feel like writing a review then why are you posting? Get bent!" or something similar.

And that's the point where I say, I can do whatever I want to here, and if I want to type up three sentences about Cloverfield, then that's what I'll do. However, typing up three sentences is not what I want to do. Even that seems like too much effort today. I've got a huge case of the ADDs. So...this is how I will do it.

Characters? Holy crap, I hated them all. That party at the the beginning...ugh. I wouldn't want to spend more than 30 seconds with any of them. It really didn't get me excited to spend the next 80 minutes with them. Part of this was due to the...

...acting. I don't know how much of this was improvised and how much was scripted, but for a "found footage" film, it came off as fake. I've seen P.O.V. flicks and mockumentaries done well. This was not.

The CGI, however, was done quite well, I thought. While the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty seemed way too small to be real, the rest of the rampant destruction was realistic enough.


I love the idea behind Cloverfield, a giant monster movie from the perspective of the man on the street. The echoes of 9/11/01 were, I'd imagine, intentional. The sense of panic, the confusion and flight amidst unanswered questions were perfectly captured. The moments after the initial attack were eerily accurate. But then...

...the whole "going back for the girl" plot was fairly insufferable. I found it so unrealistic that it irreparably knocked the train off the rails. It didn't help that I hated the characters.

It's too bad this:

was touched on only briefly- far too short a segment. I wanted to spend more time with this exploding face development.

Overall it was pretty fun- I mean, sometimes you just want to see big monsters beat the crap out of buildings and stuff. In that regard, Cloverfield was a success. As I said, I thought the "man on the street" angle was a bit ingenious. It's just too bad that the man on the street was such a shallow, smarmy jerk.

Phew! Got that out of the way. Oooh, what's over there?