1 of 35

by Darren Humphries

• Writing:

• A
• A
• A

CLOVERFIELD is the largest budgeted home movie ever made. That's the idea anyway. Following on the idea of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT but adding $25 million to the pot, it tells the supposed story of a group of friends whose going away party is rudely interrupted by a huge explosion and the dismembered head of the Statue of Liberty crashing onto their street. New York is under attack from a giant monster and all they want to do is to get away. Unfortunately for them, that isn't going to be as easy as all that.

Video cameras are seemingly everywhere these days. There isn't a disaster or a big event that some member of the public doesn't seem to be in the right place at the right time with theirs to record the chaos in grainy shake-o-vision, so it's not too much of a stretch to believe that someone would film a monster attack. The thing is that we watch those video clips on the news for a few seconds. This is a full length movie in which the camera never stops moving, almost never catches the full picture and is quite often not in focus. Sitting through that is quite an ask for an audience.

Except that it isn't. The plot is weak, even threadbare, but it is jammed full of incident and action. The initial moments of the attack (that Statue of Liberty head moment is a modern classic already)are brilliantly handled, chaotic and with a real sense of immediacy. The bridge crossing might be taken straight for Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS, but it still works. The rescue mission into a broken tower block that is leaning tenuously against another is really tense and what happens in the tunnels when the lights go out is a stand out moment.

Be warned, though, there are no answers here. Because these are ordinary people stuck in the heart of the disaster they don't know anything about the monster, its origins or the overall picture of how the military campaign against it is going. As a result, the audience knows as much about the creature at the end as they do at the beginning.

CLOVERFIELD, though, isn't about the monster, but rather about the group of people whose lives it has shattered. The naturalistic performances and manner of filming mean that you forget that these are actors and think of them as real people. The fact that you don't necessarily get to know them well enough to like them very much isn't either a help or a hindrance. The face that one of them gives a continuous narration over the whole thing is a major annoyance, however.

CLOVERFIELD takes an old, old story and gives it a whole new treatment. It's far from perfect, but that originality alone is enough to make it one of the must see films of the year.

And we didn't even mention the marketing campaign - oh damn!

Learn more about this author, Darren Humphries.

Add your voice
Know something about Movie reviews: Cloverfield? We want to hear your view. Write now!