To all Giant Monsters: Come to Manhatten, it's the new Tokyo!

Rating: 9/10 (19 January 2008)

Honestly going into Cloverfield I had my doubts. There was no big named stars, shaky independent/Blair Witchish..ish..ish... camera work (along with a similar feeling ad campaign), and a lovely unrealistic concept. Thankfully, much like it did to Manhatten, Cloverfield crushed my doubts, then bombed the crap out of them, ate a few of my doubts friends, and in an unrelated twist made my doubts dress up as a clown and give up its self dignity to try and sell used cars. Cloverfield was indeed a wonderful movie. So lets go into how destroyed such doubts.
First is the big named stars. OK I know big stars don't make a movie great, as a matter of fact they can make some movies seem worse because you feel they just cast them to have them and the part does not fit ("Minority thug from Harlem who's killed so many he's become emotionally cold? I'm thinking Rowan Atkinson.")This isn't the case here. I would not know any of these stars if I saw them on the street, outside of the fact a couple look like people I've seen drunk at college parties. This was actually a boost for this movie, as the actors did great and the fact I couldn't identify them in a line up of celebrities, or for that matter the people that live down the road, lead to making the concept more real in the idea your watching someones home video of the event at hand, that really added to this movie. I mean that too, if one of them robbed me at gun point and I had to pick them out of a lineup I would probably get it wrong, sorry again Frank you just looked seedy... Anyway.
Camera work/ Blair Witch ad campaign thingy. I have to say shaky camera work is one of my biggest qualms about independent film (it's called a tripod people, I know you don't have a big budget but my grandmother even has a tripod, GET ONE!). This was no exception to the shaky thing, but in the context of the movie setting, anything else would have been suspect, and still even with the all over camcorder work, it isn't nauseatingly shaky like so many Indy films which were shot by some cameraman I can only suspect suffers from Parkinson's (TRIPOD!! Seriously look it up), and it added to the sense of really being there. I also thought there would be no good shots of the monster because of this, but there were, unbelievably so. As for the Ad campaign, it was actually quite genius, and I have to qualms with it, I was just saying so was the Blair Witch ad campaign and I could have eaten a roll of film and produced a better movie in my bathroom about 24 hours later than that thing. It just scared me to think I may have to suffer through that again ya know.
Finally concept. Yes it is a giant monster attacking a city movie, but before you start conjuring images of a guy in a foam rubber outfit stomping Tokyo (which there is some subtle hints to that in the early movie, not the foam rubber part just the whole Godzilla thing), or worse yet start thinking of the remake of it which gave me an aneurysm, this movie is a far cry from those. This feels entirely different, and not in that walking through a yard barefoot and stepping in something that isn't dirt way, no it's in a good way. Plus with the reported budget this movie had, they must have called in some favors or black mailed someone to get this thing, it was quite spectacular.
Don't take my word for it though and I know you won't, lord knows I tried to warn you of Epic Movie but you went anyway, see it for yourself.