Lives up to the hype

Rating: 10/10 (24 January 2008)

Cloverfield is exactly what you'd expect from the trailers, and from Abrams, and because of this, I feel it fully fills the shoes of the "hype monster" it has created since the original trailer was shown during the Transformers.
Most people know going into the film that it's meant to be as realistic as possible (as far as you can get giant monsters attacking New York to be real) and so not only is it shot with what is supposed to be a hand-held camera, it also uses a cast full of unfamiliar actors to further support the idea that this isn't a just a movie. The only actor I recognized was one of the police officers (who was on screen for about 3 seconds) played Jackie Jr. on The Sopranos.
The above factors and many others definitely make Cloverfield the scariest, and most suspense filled monster movie ever. It presented a great mixture of "shocker" moments along side what I like to call "Shamalyan" moments, where the suspense and tension is a bigger payout than the rest of the scene.
The movie only goes for an 1 hour and 24 minutes, but still does a great job at establishing the main characters identities just enough to where the audience cares what happens to each of them, but not so much that we sink into boredom and get robbed of what the movie is truly about.
I'll end by saying that naysayers, whiners, and pessimistic people who rate this movie low either did not know what kind of movie they were seeing, or were bound to hate it right off the bat. This movie, in it's genre, and what it was made to do, should definitely be an eight star or above rated movie forever.
If you WANT to see this movie based off the trailers, I can give you my guarantee you WILL like it. I can not stress this enough.