Motion sickness with a twist

Rating: 7/10 (8 April 2010)

After coming out from seeing this movie me and a friend had a small debate about whether there would ever be a newly invented stylized genre of film, and if not will films always be pigeonholed in the same exhausted genres we constantly see rehashed now? I kept asking myself "in a hundred years will audiences still be watching updated versions on the same old concepts?" I was always taught, "don't mess with genre" and in today's market this regrettably holds true....
Obviously Cloverfield is a "updated version" in a classic film genre; the monster movie. Also obvious is how this bothers me, mostly because of the hype that was built around this film, or rather the viral marketing campaign that sent fanboys everywhere racing to their online message boards in nerdy excitement. Producer J.J Abrams sent the Internet in a tizzy (yeah I said tizzy) with clever viral marketing tactics, never hinting on what the film was actually about until the ominous teaser poster with a decapitated Statue of Liberty entitled "1.18.08." With this much mystery-laden buildup a big payoff was certainly expected, yet behind all of this hype was just another variation of yes, a monster movie. Now at this point you're either thinking I'm being cynical or I just have high expectations, but you'd be right because yeah, I am and I do.
See I was really rooting Cloverfield wouldn't just be another monster movie, that it be more clever, something no one has ever seen before. But maybe I'm just gonna have to just accept the fact that genre films will live a lot longer than I ever will and I should just get over it.... but not today friend, because, in fact, there really wasn't anything clever about this film at all, its basically Godzilla meets Blair Witch Project. The convention of telling the story in first person perspective through a shaky consumer camera was built for and attends to the iGeneration, and although commendable is still a cheap trick. However (and this is big however) under the guise of this marketing ploy, there is a really good film. The way the film's writer Drew Goddard establishes the lead characters in the first act is really involving, and I did actually kinda care for their outcome when the monster (eventually) attacks Manhattan.
As good as the movie's cinema verite style is there is still a lot of questionable motivation throughout the film (They all go back to where the monster is, really?) and you also really have to use your suspension of disbelief to believe some of the um, logistics (the handicam has night vision, a built in light, can record over an hour and a half of footage, and can survive a 100 foot drop?) But forgoing all my negativity (as you should), this film ultimately achieves its goal of allowing the audience to experience first hand what the characters are experiencing. And even if it's in a hackneyed monster movie genre, as a native New Yorker I was at the edge of my seat, eating up every second of it, call me cliché.