Stylish and definitely effective, if flawed.

Rating: Null/10 (31 July 2011)

Cloverfield is at first glance not the kind of film I'd bother to review. Numerous reviews here comment on the hype around its release, and there is a definite 'love it or hate it' feel to things. Still, clearly weighted towards the 'love it' camp.
As we all know, the 'clever' conceit is that this is a discovered DV tape covering the experiences of an apocalypse-like event in Manhattan. The DV tape thing, I thought, worked well enough. You get the interesting temporal tool of the main footage being recorded over existing video, so we see snippets of a previous day in which the main character has formed a romantic bond with the girl he eventually goes back to save. It takes a moment to get a feel for this disjointed exposition, but it works.
For all this of course it tends towards fairly 'realist' acting, and the main performers are capable, if given little to work with. There are some convincingly shocking moments. Comparisons to the laughably stupid Blair Witch Project simply don't stand up. In addition, this benefits from the nice faculty of serious, big-scale visual effects being coupled with the hand-held, 'camcorder' footage. This undermines disbelief very well.
Unfortunately, suspension of disbelief pretty much ends there. The monsters in the film are far too conventional and familiar, and, frankly, are much too visible. It would have been much better seeing much more of the effect of their presence, and much less of them, especially the big daddy monster. In addition, there are countless holes in the plot, or certainly in the behaviour of the protagonists. If you're going for 'super-realism' in your disaster movie, then you've got to be a bit realistic about people's actions and motivations. This wasn't. Fair enough, the main character might (maybe) go back to rescue his girlfriend from her damaged building. But no way would the broadly uninvolved others come along with him into the jaws of death, and certainly they wouldn't bother going around filming all of it. Then again, these days, perhaps that bit is fair enough! In any case, what it gained in stylistic, visual realism, it lost in the lack of narrative credibility. A shame, really. Could have been really good.
Still, an enjoyable enough, if slightly pointless hour-and-a-half of film, with some nice and pretty well achieved aesthetic ideas. Not quite the genre-shattering event it maybe could have been, but certainly worth seeing for an entertaining Friday evening in.