Was all the hype and anticipation worth it? Not really.

Rating: 5/10 (18 October 2008)

The marketing techniques that were used to promote the new low-budget American monster movie "Cloverfield" were used so well that the movie was destined to attract hordes of people to the theater just to answer their questions. An enormous amount of hype and eager anticipation was created as a result of the clever promotion efforts. But was the movie worth the wait and the hype? Not really.
I will not expose the plot of the movie in a complex manner, because there's really no complexity to the plot at all. A monster of unexplained origin attacks New York City and a few survivors document the attack via a hand-held camcorder and thus, the entire movie is shown through this in a "Blair Witch Project" (1999) style. There is no music score to adhere to the documentary-like style.
This could have been a good movie. This could have been a wonderful movie. But it isn't. Some people, such as my parents, disliked the film enormously for the reason that it is shot in the "shaky camera" fashion where the camera goes out of focus, jiggles around nonstop, and so forth. I personally am not fond of the shaky camera, but that's not the reason I didn't like the film.
"Cloverfield" is tediously slow, boring, highly uninteresting, features a few moments of well-done thrills and it does a good job and creating an illusion that all that is happening on the screen was real, but it fails to scare us, surprise us, and even really generally entertain us. This is a movie that was advertised really well, but amazingly the marketing was better than the product itself. "Cloverfield" is only about eighty-four minutes long and even then, its mercilessly long due to the fact that nothing really happens in it. The first half hour is pure nonstop dreck-style talking and yammering about pointless nonsense from these mostly annoying characters and then even when the monster attack finally arrives, "Cloverfield" has caused us to lose interest. Soon enough, the monster becomes uninteresting as well.
To me, "Cloverfield" was just like cheesy low-budget science-fiction monster flicks that you will always find on the Sci-Fi channel. Examples including "Python" (2000), "Boa vs. Python" (2004), and "100 Million B.C. (2008). The only difference is, it has better special effects and better acting. But in terms of plot execution, characters, and just general entertainment value, it's exactly the same.