by Casey Mensing

Created on: May 15, 2009   Last Updated: May 16, 2009

Cloverfield Review:

J. J. Abrams, the mastermind behind the hit shows Lost and Felicity and the new Star Trek movie brought to life his tribute to great monster movies of the past, Cloverfield, or when Godzilla and the Blair Witch had a baby. Abrams even used age old teaser techniques to create an unbelievable hype around the movie before it's release. These teaser trailers, particularly in regards to 'horror' or 'thrillers' was first used on movie goers in 1925 with the film 'The Phantom of the Opera' starring the greatest actor of the silent era Lon Chaney. All promotional materials distributed prior to the release of Phantom had Chaney's gruesome, disfigured face covered, never to be seen until one dramatic moment in the film, that was meant to frighten the audience, sending them running from the theater.

Cloverfield is the story of a group of young New Yorkers that are hanging out at a going away party for Rob (Michel Stahl-David) who is moving to Tokyo, when the city is suddenly attacked by an unseen monster. For the rest of the movie the story of five of these party goers fighting to survive the chaos of a city under attack as told via the video recordings made on a hand held digital video camera. Right about now, your probably thinking to yourself, sounds a lot like the Blair Witch Project. And you would be correct. Cloverfield also has a romantic subplot through the movie which is told through recordings that were on the same DV cassette as the footage of the monster attack. Since by the end of the film all that is left of the five characters is the camera and the tape within, I suppose we are to believe that the person who found the footage carefully took the time to edit it all in order to tell a cohesive story with both a plot and subplot. Because, you know that happens often in home movies.

Besides being an overly hyped Blair Witch knockoff, this movie suffered from many other problems. First off the acting is well, I won't say bad, just predictable. I found it hard to really care about any of the characters, and the whole subplot of love found then lost between Rob and Beth, whose trip to Coney Island was captured on the same tape that's being used to capture the monster attack, the clips of which provide the romantic subplot throughout, really phony. In the Coney Island footage there isn't any real chemistry between the actors, and Rob's mad dash through the city to reach Beth who was at her apartment when the monster attacked just seems silly.

The fact that this whole film is supposedly shot with hand held DV cameras is also ridiculous. First off, it's obvious that the audio/video aspects of the movie are high quality, including multi-channel surround sound and high resolution video that could never be produced by the camera that was supposedly used. Now I can suspend my disbelief, for the sake of a movie, especially when the results of making an authentic version of this film with actual DV cameras would have lead to an unusable product, but my question is why even bother. What was the point of bringing in the Blair Witch comparisons and not just making a straight up, great monster movie?

Over all I thought this movie was poorly executed from start to finish. Besides the problems with technical continuity and boring acting and directing, I thought the film lacked any redeemable aspects that made it worth the hype. But maybe that's why all the hype was necessary, the studio somehow needed to get people interested in something that's not even a great B movie.

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