I was robbed.

When I plunked down my hard earned cash to see Cloverfield, I expected a monster movie less unlike anything I had ever seen, a monster that would live forever in my nightmares, a movie that would suspend disbelief and most importantly, I expected to be entertained. Instead, I got a silly love story, a bad headache from the jittery camera, a monster that looked like it was ripped out of Gears of War, and video proof that stupid people need to be executed before they further weaken our gene pool. It is to be avoided like the plague.

Cloverfield's concept, as we all know by now, is that a tape was found in the ruins of Central Park after a giant thing attacked and destroyed New York. On this tape is a "man-on-the-street" account of more or less what happened. Unfortunately, to get to this, we're forced to watch 20 minutes of twenty-something soap opera.

Our "story" begins with our hero, Rob, filming the morning afterglow of his hookup with longtime crush Beth (who's hot enough, honestly, that he should have been filming the act itself to prove it happened). The video is overwritten, mostly, by a celebration of Rob getting a real job and heading off to Japan (overwritten so poorly that every time the tape of the party is stopped, we are thrown back to that afterglow day).

At this party we find out that Rob was a complete tool to Beth after their hookup, and she has since started dating someone else - basically, it's about half an episode of Felicity - and after 20 minutes of this, we're praying to see something blow up. The film's pace ratchets up when the severed head of Lady Liberty is chucked into a lower Manhattan street and effectively ends the party. In order for a movie like this to work, it needs to make the audience suspend disbelief, and to the film's credit, this scene being shot on YouTube quality video does just that.

The movie should have ended with the people fleeing Manhattan to safety, like most people with any kind of sense would. That sense of suspending disbelief is completely undone by the sequence of events that leaves Rob, Lily, Marlena, and cameraman Hud going TOWARD the monster to find Beth on a suicidal rescue mission.

The monster itself is very well done - hideous, unique, and definitely nightmarish - but the problem is the movie is too in love with its viral marketing campaign to give us a clear shot of the damned thing until near the end of the movie, well after we've been thoroughly frustrated by the stupidity of the main characters and the (lack of) plot.

This isn't a movie. It's a 90 minute viral video. The camera work is jittery, the dialogue is hokey, and the plot is stupid. I feel robbed.

Learn more about this author, Frank Thomas.
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