Potentially cool film ruined by laughable acting & writing.

Rating: 3/10 (28 January 2008)

The Good: Personally, I'm a huge fan of the hand-held/shaky-camcorder style of film-making when it's done right. Especially coupled with big-budget special FX, it can really bring otherwise ridiculously fantastical situations to life. This technique was handled very well in Cloverfield; the scenes with monsters or things blowing up were well done on that side of things.
Another thing I'm a huge fan of is movies that don't lay everything out for you and explain every last bit of the story away so you don't have to hurt yourself using your imagination. This, along with the camera work, seem to be the two main things people are complaining about...but for me, these are the two most (only?) redeeming qualities of the movie.
The Bad: Insert anything else you can think of that has to do with movies here. (On second thought, you can also add the lack of a musical soundtrack to the "good" list above.) The characters, their actions/reactions, acting, plot, writing, all of it - just bad.
Sidenote: I didn't catch the rating of this film (I'm guessing PG?), but one of the most unbelievable aspects of this move was the lack of any noticeable "F words" spoken by anybody. I'm sorry, but if that was happening in my city and I was running away from a building-sized monster and being attacked by giant shrimp and Statue of Liberty heads I doubt I'd be able to get any other words out of my mouth for days.
The Meh: The "realism" of the camera work was totally undermined by a lack of commitment on the cinematographer's part. Most of the time it looked like normal movie-quality footage, just shot with a hand-held camera. It seemed like they were really going for the gritty realism thing, but they didn't take it all the way (as in 28 Days Later, for instance).
It also might have been nice to drop the whole Blair Witch "we found this camera" gimmick and just shoot it in lo-fi digital cam style to give it the realism without having the need for a character literally holding the camera thru the entire movie. Again, as in 28 Days Later.