"The Lowest of the Low"

Rating: 1/10 (22 June 2008)

This pathetic excuse for entertainment is, first and foremost, just plain nauseating to sit through. The movie is filmed entirely from a hand-held video camera, and serves to offer up a 9/11-wannabe-apocalyptic-nightmere, in which the audience is forced to watch a group of hip young adults (led by the unimpressive Michael Stahl-David) get killed off one by one. In addition to the nausea factor, the premise of the film is incredibly contradictory: a "realistic" portrait of New York City being attacked by a giant sea monster. Thirdly, its cheap avoidance of exposition -mantra throughout"We have no idea what's going on!"can and will get quite bothersome. Of course, one could throw most of these criticisms out the window by saying that it doesn't matter where the monster came from, or why it invades the city, or why the movie is even called "Cloverfield" to begin with (all questions that are never addressed). The heart of the story lies in the individual, personal tales of the main characters: their private lives and relationships are at the center of the movie. Alas, this key serves only to open a Pandora's box of even more serious faults. Quite simply, the characters that the producer-writer-director team of J.J. Abrams, Drew Goddard and Matt Reeves, respectively, offer up are so cliché as to make even the monster's spider-like spawn cringe. The men all look and talk exactly the same (everyone's a "bro" at their party), as do the women. Everyone is hip (not to mention affluent), partying it up in, wouldn't you know it, the West Village. Everyone is attractive (in the conventional sense of beauty, at least); quite simply, there are no ugly people in this movie. In addition, the movie feeds off of the plethora of brave-but-stupid personalities that have all but taken over the roles of protagonists in mainstream entertainment today: Rob Hawkins (Mr. Stahl-David) could evacuate the city like everyone else, but he just can't leave without making sure that his affair (the remarkably gorgeous Odette Yustman) is brought down to safety from her multimillion-dollar apartment in the Time Warner building first. Although this decision proves to be fatal for both him and his friends (including his brother, played by Mike Vogel), at least he gets to die with his current love interestright? Mark my words: you have been warned; however, some advice for the brave-but-stupid; the especially curious: don't try consuming food while watching this movie (it's only 75 minutes long: you can wait).