Eastern Movie Remake mixed with Blair Witch

Rating: 1/10 (14 February 2010)

This movie is a kind of remake of "Gwoemul" (a.k.a. "The Host", 2006 Korean movie), mixed with the "shaky camera" from "Blair Witch". The main difference is the size of the monster. Gwoemul's monster is about the size of a cargo van, so it "interacts" with humans directly. Cloverfield's monster is Godzilla sized, but don't worry, the plot brings up an excuse to force an interaction with the human victims.
The second greatest difference is on camera direction. "Gwoemul" uses a conventional camera style, while "Cloverfield" uses the "field documentary" kind of filming, as seen on movies like "Blair Witch", "(REC)" and the remake of "Battlestar Galactica" TV series. The obvious problem on this approach is that the director needs an excuse to keep filming, even when it's very unlikely that the character with the camera would do so (or have the means to keep recording or to get the best angles). On "Blair Witch", the characters wanted to keep a record for whomever would find their corpses, in case they didn't survive. "(REC)" had probably the best excuse of all, the character was a professional cameraman, working for a news channel, so he had all reasons to keep filming, even when his life was at stake (as seen in actual war documentaries, for example). "Battlestar Galactica" had no reason at all to use "shaky camera", they did so to mask the poor acting/action and bad visual effects, mainly on the first seasons. "Cloverfield" solved that by putting the camera on the hands of the kind of person that make you wonder if he's on drugs or suffered a brain damaging accident. Because of such lame excuse, about half of the scenes on this movie make absolutely no sense. I mean, someone running for its life, don't matter how idiot it is, wouldn't keep a camcorder at eye level to record its friends' escape from death (much less point the camera backward to record the monster coming after them!) Other plot details from "Gwoemul" were adapted to "Cloverfield", like the "problem" that happens when someone is bitten or scratched by a monster (and exactly like on the former, it is completely left undeveloped, such a waste!) The endings are also very similar, although with different technological approaches.
Finally, similarly to "Gwoemul", "Cloverfield" doesn't bother to explain its title. Of course, there are lots of out-of-the-movie explanations, but no one coming from the movie itself.
I managed to watch this once, but never again. Another Western remake of an Eastern movie, with an irritating camera style and underdeveloped plot (not that the former had much of a development, to begin with...)
The (few) visual effects are well done, but it is a dark night scenario, I'm not sure it would look so good at daylight (as it does on "Gwoemul"). It almost makes me want to raise my rating on "Gwoemul"...