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It's taken almost ten years for somebody to make good on the promise of "The Blair Witch Project". The entire Blair Witch experience hinged on people thinking that there was a good chance that this actually happened. This is the exact same thing Orson Welles did with the War of the Worlds broadcast in 1939. It literally caused a nationwide panic. With the Blair Witch, like ripple moving outward, the movie lost its punch as time went on and more people talked. Cloverfield takes that idea and explodes it. They know there is no way that anyone is going to believe it actually happened - so they take it the other direction.

Cloverfield is quite simply the most realistic giant, city-destroying monster movie of all time. If Godzilla, and let's face it - it might as well be - actually attacked New York, this is how we as citizens would see it. We would see it the way we see a Category 5 tornado or, as I'm sure we all remember, 9-11. We see it in shakey, home movie footage and on the news. This is why, for me at least, Cloverfield works. It's the possibility and the reality of it that scared me. I could easily see this footage on CNN with the words "amature video" on the bottom.

The thing about YouTube video and embedded reporter video - they are weak on detail and still rely on human commentary to get their point across. This all began with Rodney King and the helicopter footage of the riots that followed, where the rioters pulled a man out of the truck and beat him to death. Those two events kicked off the information age we live in, in a lot of ways. But if you look at those videos - what do you really see? There's not a lot of detail.

Cloverfield is a monster movie - yes. But the writer, Drew Goddard, is from the Whedon/Abrams school of writing; there is no story without emotion - no matter how outlandish or crazy the events. Drew has spent the better part of a decade trolling around on shows like Buffy, Angel, Lost, Alias - shows that all have something in common - the ideas and plots are huge and iconic... but the characters are human and flawed and emotive and in peril. He takes this to the extreme with Cloverfield. These characters are smack dab in the middle of a Godzilla movie and you're worried about them. You feel their pain and their tiny triumphs and their heroism.

The big thing you are going to hear about this movie is that you don't see much of the creature and you don't really know what it is. That's true and there's a lot of people who won't be satisfied

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