This movie was an absolute joke!

Rating: 1/10 (19 May 2008)

Cloverfield is the type of film that asks so much from its audience and delivers so little. Right from the start it basically gets down on its hands and knees begging and pleading everyone to take it seriously.
It tells you to excuse the bad camera work which tries desperately at times to cover up the next thing it asks you to ignore, the pathetic acting abilities of all the unknown actors involved.
Then we get to the story (if one could call it that) and the tissue paper thin plot. We begin at a going away party in New York for this guy Rob that gets interrupted by rumblings and explosions in the distance which which are being caused by some sort of monster. So then Rob, his cameraman and friends start heading out of New York when Rob gets a call from a girl (Beth) that he slept with one time, apparently is in trapped in her apartment. So Rob decides to go and save her and his friends for tag along for the ride. To quickly sum up, one by one all our main characters die either by a big monster, a little monster or an explosion.
The entire movie is filmed from the point of view of a hand-held camera which for some reason has the longest battery life I've ever seen, and somehow is able to still function properly despite being dropped a couple of times and survive a helicopter crash.
Overall, Cloverfield is filled with people pretending to be actors, A boring story with little or no explanation of much of anything, and one indestructible video camera.
It is clear that the marketing campaign was where the majority of the budget for this movie went as this film was all hype and no substance. The hype for this movie was caused it go to the top of the box office in its first week and when word spread of how bad the film truly was, it sunk at box office falling in 5 weeks from 1st to 4th to 9th to 12th and the out of the top 20.
If you really hated this movie as I did, check out rifftrax.com home of our friends from Mystery Science Theater who know a thing or two about bad movies. The running commentary given is perfect as they give this movie the beating it deserves.