Relentless and disorientating - a fantastic cinema experience.

Rating: 10/10 (8 February 2008)

Well, I thought it was amazing.
Looking up and down this board, I see that Cloverfield has really split the vote. Most of the comments seem to say that the movie was 'derivative' (of course it was, but that was besides the point. It wasn't about the b-movie monster, it was about how people would genuinely react to the b- movie monster) and 'didn't live up to the hype'. Well, I haven't been following the hype of this movie, in fact the only bit of promotion I saw was the trailer before Transformers, so I went in with virtually no preconceptions. Perhaps one of the problems lies in the ability of hype to whip fanboys into a frenzy to a point that they already have a version of the movie in their heads when they go into a theatre, and are naturally frustrated when the real movie is different to theirs...
But I was utterly blown away.
I've watched so many films in my life, and haven't been scared or bothered in any way by a film since I was 12. I think this is because, as a filmgoing public, we are used to all the set ups, all the knock downs. Every camera angle, music cue, every way a scene plays out. we're utterly fluent in the language of cinema, to such a point that we are never going to be affected by it on anything more than a superficial level. This movie throws that all out of the window - in a good way. No music. No set-ups. No cheap scares. Nothing in this movie tells you you're watching a movie. You're completely disorientated from start to finish, completely uncomfortable and on edge. And that is a hell of an achievement in today's de-sensitised movie environment. While I didn't jump once, like some of the people I was sitting with, I did find myself clutching the chair arms at various points.
And of course it's derivative. EVERY monster movie cliché is in there, and so it should be. The monster destroys landmarks. The military fight the monster. News reports advancing the plot. But it's delivered with such style and such punch that you can't help but be awed. You're seeing these events on an ant's eye level. There are no sweeping special effects shots of the White House being demolished by aliens, no aerial shots of buildings being destroyed - instead we get distant, unidentifiable bangs, fires obscured by the cityscape, an enormous leg moving behind a skyscraper - and a distant object which comes hurtling through the air, finally landing amidst chaos in a street, revealing itself to be the head of the statue of liberty.
This personal touch goes deeper - characters disappear from the story, and we (the audience) don't know their fate because the main characters don't.
The effects, with one or two exceptions (the money shot of the monster at the end springs to mind), are seamlessly integrated. A lifelong "effects spotter", I found myself not even noticing when something that MUST have been CGI was on screen (the leaning skyscraper completely passed me by - I only thought 'wow, that wasn't real' later).
And people are going to pick on the film because it doesn't tick all the boxes. You don't know why the monster's here, or what it wants. We don't find out what happened to the girl in the helicopter, or what really happens when one of the little things bites you. The monster could still be out there for all we know. But all of this ambiguity just adds to the realism, the disorientation and the hysteria. You want everything wrapped up in a nice little package? Go and watch one of those awful American J-horror remakes like The Ring, where they took all the ambiguity of the original and ruined the movie by "explaining everything". I want a bit of mystery. Remember, this is a very personal ant's eye view of the attack. The guy behind the camera didn't know all that stuff, so why should we?
I hate it when people tell me I didn't 'get' something, be it a movie, book or whatever. I find it intensely patronising, so I won't say the same to the droves of reviewers here who seem to have missed the utter genius at work in this movie. All I will say is let the hype die down and then go back and give it an objective look. You will be impressed.