Cloverfield - Paramount

Could have been a 4 to 5 starts..........but

Lots of good stuff in this movie, including the monster itself, the creatures, the effects, and the deployment of the army/soldiers.
What brings it down it the shaky camera work (barf) and most of
the actors.
Good for a view and not a keeper due to the shaky camera syndrome.

One Crappy movie unless you like vertigo

I actually saw this movie at the theatre. I could barely watch for more than 10 minutes at a time. At one point in the movie because the continual movement of the camera i had to get up and leave.

The camcorder is the star; point of view is everything

Of course, reviewers are going to complain about the shaky camcorder photography. Whether or not it made them dizzy or ill depends upon their own sensibilities; perhaps they are the people who become easily car sick or air sick; perhaps on the big screen in a dark theatre the moving images are magnified. I don't know; I viewed it on DVD.

Okay. But without the camcorder perspective, what do we have? Another throwback to 1950s post-atomic fallout science-fiction with giant squids, giant octopii, scorpians, locusts, spiders, ants, and preying mantises -- all the result of man's carelessness with nuclear detonations? The story, of course, is nothing: Beth and Rob "had sex" (woooooooo -- how old are these people? young sophisticated New York Yuppies or midwestern twelve-year-olds?) No. The story is nothing, but the presentation is everything -- point of view is the central gimmick and existential premise. Versimilitude is all -- the unreal is made to look real.

Film scholar Louis D. Giannetti reminded us years ago that each new camera set-up in a motion picture, between or even within shots, presents viewers with a new perspective from which to evaluate what they see. Films, for example, often combine omniscient narration with the first person, and the director may cut directly from first-person subjective point-of-view shots to objective camera angles, from close-ups to gauge reactions of single characters to long shots [UNDERSTAND MOVIES. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976].

Many films have, through the years, relied heavily on the subjective camera (e.g., LADY IN THE LAKE, 1946) and those FRIDAY THE 13th blood- baths where horny teenages at Crystal Lake are murdered one by one. In Jack Arnold's 3-D film IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, 1953), audiences are given control over the earthlings because the point of view when they confront the aliens is from the aliens' perspective, a device that allows the audience to see the earthlings as victims. The residents of the sleepy desert town of Sand Rock, Arizona, fimd themselves enveloped in the billowing fog that borders the vision of the viewers while they stalk victims from behind the bubble-eye of the aliens.

CLOVERFIELD is part of this subjective camera sub-genre. It begins disarmingly enough with a clever, non-horror title -- quite inspired -- not what one would expect for a monster movie like those of the 1950s or the awful Godzilla imports. The tape found in the camcorder is the whole story -- from the beginning when Rob is sneaking up on Beth during the morning-after sequence to the Coney Island close-ups of Beth giggling into the lens -- to the ending when we are back at Coney Island, the part of the tape which was not inadvertently taped over by beginner videographer "Hud" (coaxed into taking on videotaping chores by the hero's brother who wants a record of the party which is celebrating the brother's departure to Japan). The ending of the tape is the ending of the film, showing Rob and Beth's idyllic time together before the mayhem -- the tape which has now, according to the beginning of the film, become part of an official government documentation of the events.

The New York setting provides understandable echoes of 9-11 -- another terrorist attack, as some of the panicked characters speculate. Fortunately, the cinema verite plot focuses more on the fleeing citizens than on the scientists and military types that we saw in the 1950s, but with 21st century dialogue and profanity. Even one of the military officers looks like an alumnus from the TWIN PEAKS television series, but he is onscreen in only fleeting, hand-held shots. I wonder if he complained to his agent about this. We even see scenes of enterprising thieves breaking into an electronics store and looting it -- an aspect of disasters that, unfortunately, are all too real and commonplace. Even our hero, the Tom Cruise clone, steals a phone in order to call his trapped former girl friend, Beth. As they try to cross the bridge to Brooklyn, the hero's brother is wiped out, along with many others, when the tail of the gigantic creature descends on the historical structure. So much for being an iconoclast -- first the Statue of Liberty is decapitated; then the famous bridge is sawed in half. No respect.

CLOVERFIELD may not be the overnight commercial success that THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT enjoyed, but it is as least as effective, and the denouement is just as downbeat. Quit whining about the shaking camera and enjoy the experience for what it is supposed to be -- an exercise in verisimilitude.

Get a Barf Bag Ready

Simply put, this movie is terrible. About 15 minutes into it you will be reaching for a Barf Bag. It is video camera style shooting from start to finish. Jerky hard to watch and nauseating. Save your money for something better.

Sickening

Literally. We watched this movie this past weekend. About halfway through I was sweating and felt nauseous. I had to go lay down for an hour to get rid of an incredible headache. A few minutes later my oldest son joined me, saying he felt like he was going to be ill. Adding to all my misery, was the fact that I was enjoying the movie up to this point and I didn't want to miss the ending! My son and I are my families rollercoaster enthusiasts and everything. My other son and husband don't do rollercoasters and they never became ill watching this movie. Very strange. So that is just my movie's proceed with caution. The next day we picked the movie back up where we had stopped it. (In the middle). I worked on something else and listened to the movie, looking up only occasionally. I felt lightheaded, but didnt' become ill. I have to say, this movie was pretty good. The idea of using a camera was pretty cool, but I think they could've made it a little more stabilized and not lost the core audience or the point they want to get across. I loved the fact that they never explain where the monster came from. In a crisis like that no one would know until after the fact. I thought the acting was good and the storyline suspenseful. There was gore, but not a tremendous amount so I was ok with that too. There is definitely a movie worth watching here and I am only sorry I couldn't see every minute of it.