Interesting but ultimately unsatisfying

Rating: 6/10 (18 October 2011)

Take the hand-held camera gimmick of The Blair Witch Project and marry it to a standard monster-destroys-city flick and you've got Cloverfield. It's an interesting way to tell a monster movie, seen closely through the eyes of a small, bland group of friends caught up in the disaster, yet while I found it interesting it never really pulled me in, and the ending did not make me happy.
You can't talking about this movie without talking about Blair Witch, mainly because Blair Witch took the same gimmick and got so much more out of it. Even though that earlier movie had a fraction of the budget, it used the device so much more effectively; compare the final talking to the camera scenes from both films and tell me Cloverfield's is even a tenth as effective.
It is also less convincing as a premise. The guy with the camera is oddly devoted to documenting the event, to the point where he will stand back and film when he should be helping. In the real world, one of his friends would have grabbed the camera and threw it against a wall. Because of the way it's done, you never forget that this is just a clever device. Blair Witch was more convincing because the camera was the whole point and you were dealing with someone who would think in those terms.
Still, it does have it's good points. Because we see everything from one point of view, we get information in bits and pieces and never get anything like a real explanation of what's going on. There are individually effective scenes. The cameraman is vaguely likable, although everyone else is pretty forgettable.
Ultimately though, the hand-held single view camera is not an effective way to film action or horror scenes, the story and characters fail to be interesting, and the ending is very disappointing. It's interesting enough to watch, but it could have been so much better.