A revolution in film making. Pure genius.

Rating: 10/10 (20 January 2008)

I remember way back when, sitting in the third row from an enormous screen with all of my friends, about to watch the midnight showing of an epic movie called Transformers. I remember wanting to skip through all of the stupid and ridiculously pointless previews as to see my favorite Autobots duke it out with the vicious Decepticons in 3D. I also remember a trailer that became more infamous than Transformers itself: the highly mysterious 1-18-08 trailer.
Nobody knew anything about it. There was some teenager leaving town and the Statue of Liberty got decapitated bysomething. I remember everyone in my theatre gasping and whispering "What was that?" to each other when the trailer ended without a title.
So, while Bumblebee was battling Barricade in the all-out brawl of the century, I was pondering one thing: just what was 1-18-08? After only a few days of Transformers being in theatres, the buzz was everywhere of this strange, mysterious movie. What was it? Who was starring in it? Was it going to be all hand-held cameras? However, there was no doubt in everyone's minds: the trailer was brilliant.
As opening day for the newly-titled Cloverfield rapidly approached, everyone's thoughts were joined again with one simple question: can the movie live up to the trailer? The answer: No, it didn't live up to the trailer.
It surpassed it and never looked back.
Cloverfield is as real as it gets, folks. The very beginning of the movie shows a video tape menu of sorts, almost as if the tape was rewinding. Then it shows footage of our main character, Rob, and his girlfriend, Beth. However, the feel-good footage is soon recorded over with our main story, like it was a real video tape.
The first ten minutes are simply hilarious, simply because it's undeniably realistic. It's as if you're watching some real footage of a couple of college kids who recorded a party with their camera, only it's on a big screen. You really can't help but laugh.
However, the party is soon interrupted by a large earthquake caused by somethingsomething bad. And huge. And terrifying.
You never actually see the Cloverfield monster in full until a good twenty minutes into the movie, and even then it's somewhat blurry. That hardly matters, though, because the hand-held camera look makes each and every special effect in this movie look 100% real. So, seeing a large claw/foot/tail/etc is horrifying.
The footage (I can't bring myself to call this a movie; it's far too entertaining and real) is shocking, scary, and sometimes disturbingly realistic. You'll be on the edge of your seat so much, not because it's so action packed, but because you feel as if you're watching real people on the screen and you want to root for them.
The acting is pretty good, the dialogue obviously phenomenal, making all of the lines seem incredibly modern-day "what would this teenager say if the monster just killed his friend?" sorta thing. That just adds to the intensity of the footage.
There are so many twists and turns in the movie, so many shocking moments, and so many different encounters with the monster. But what makes this movie stand out from other monster movies is that it focuses on a group of nobodies. It doesn't focus on the military or a nerdy scientist who can defeat the monster. No, it focuses on a group of teenagers who have no clue what's going on. It deals with the fear of the unknown and the chaos surrounding them. The best part of the film is that it doesn't go into any detail as to what the monster is or where it came from. Which is good, because the teens recording the tape wouldn't know anyway. You see what they see.
The footage is about 80 minutes (the standard length of an actually video camera cassette tape) and each and every second of it is breathtaking. The monster isn't what scary, it's the intensity of the realism that's scary. Think United 93 (phenomenal movie) with monsters instead of terrorists. That's the gist.
Revolutionizing. Not only to the monster genre, but to movies altogether.