Really not that bad

Rating: 7/10 (25 July 2008)

OK, so it's not Oscar material, whatever that means, but all in all Cloverfield was by no means a waste of 80 minutes.
I only vaguely remember the TV ad campaign so I was going into this one pretty open-minded, and thankfully so as if I had read a few of the reviews on IMDb I may never have pressed play.
As far as shock/horror films go, it had all the basics. You've got some great "holy sh*t moments" topped off nicely with good but not excessive use of CGI and rather surprisingly, a cast of characters that I actually cared about.
This was the first film I've seen since the Blair Witch Project that uses the 'handy-cam' viewing angle throughout the whole film, and I think it worked extremely well. At the time I thought the 20 minutes spent on introducing the characters at the beginning was a little excessive, but after watching the whole thing it really balanced out well.
In summary, having no expectations of this film always meant I wasn't going to be too disappointed. Having said that I think Cloverfield had enough bite to it to make it one of the better monster films I've seen in a very long time.