Did you honestly think it could live up to the hype?

Rating: 5/10 (22 January 2008)

Keeping this comment as short as possible, "Cloverfield" had the unfortunate pleasure of falling victim to the hype . I saw this movie opening night with a group of buddies and not one of us loved it, and only a couple of us even liked it a little. This is not to say the movie is awful, but given the amount of buzz about this movie, there is no way it could deliver....and it doesn't. It's only 84 minutes but feels like 3 hours with all the awful camera work (which will realistically leave you nauseated) and the empty dialog and pointless character development. Most of the downtime is full of empty, dull, boring dialog which is the first sign of bad screen writing. The parts that are meant to be thrilling deliver well enough but most of the movie is spent watching a video camera record the ground of various NY locales. Not to mention, the whole bit with the Starship trooper B list monsters biting people and causing their chests to explode was a bit unnecessary and kinda detracted from everything else. On the whole, I did not like this movie. It did somethings well enough but on the whole it was an experience I don't want to repeat. It hurt to watch and the monster is hardly part of the movie. While it was an interesting and, dare I say, good idea, "Cloverfield" fails to deliver.