A Simple Yet Entertaining Monster Movie

Rating: 7/10 (19 January 2008)

So i went to see "Cloverfield" yesterday and i know a lot of you are dying to see it. So i decided to write a review about it.
The story of "Cloverfield" is simple. A bunch of people are hanging out and minding their own business when the city is attacked by a huge creature and they have to try to make it out of the situation alive. Its your basic monster movie plot and there's nothing really special or different about the plot to make it anything more than your basic monster movie plot. The characters are all fairly shallow. The only ones who have any real sort of depth are the Rob and Beth characters but they aren't much deeper than the rest of the cast. Any actor aiming for an Oscar are likely not going to get a nomination for these roles. Not because they're bad actors but because there's not much to work with when it comes to these characters.
Speaking of the acting, everyone did what they could with these characters. There aren't any breakthrough performances here but at the same time there aren't any terrible performances either. It's all pretty average. In fact, most of the acting consisted of running and screaming and the occasional fall now and then. But the parts when they weren't running and screaming were pretty convincing so props to the cast there.
The special effects were undeniably good with this film. The visuals of the tore up and broken New York city were pretty beautiful as ironic as the sounds. The most impressive visuals, in my opinion, were the statue of liberty's head when it came crashing down into the streets. Watching that scene in the commercials is great and all but you really have to see that on the big screen to get the full effect of it. To put it simply, this movie had some really great special effects. Not as great as the special effects of "Transformers" but then again i doubt that anything in the next few years will be able to top that movie in the special effects department.
Anyway. The one big complaint that i have against this movie is the way it was made. Don't get me wrong. The concept of the film and how it is shown through a hand held camera was a brilliant idea but that was the very reason the made this movie extremely hard for me to watch. The camera was really shaky, especially during the scenes where the camera man was running. Halfway through the movie I had to tilt my head back and take deep breaths and i had to continue this every few minutes so i was watching a lot of the second half of the movie through the corner of my eye. I usually don't get motion sickness but this movie really had my stomach turning.
The bottom line is that if you can get past the shaky camera you'll have yourself a simple yet entertaining monster movie. But if you're looking for something that will make you "feel" things this is not the movie for you. As long as you don't look too far into "Cloverfield" and just take it for what it is i'm pretty sure you'll enjoy it. And you might want to bring a barf bag just in case.
My Overall Rating: 7 out of 10