Poor. So Poor.

Rating: 3/10 (22 January 2008)

I'm going to try to keep spoilers at a minimum here, but having wasted $12 this weekend to see Cloverfield (thank you Manhattan), I feel it's my duty to try and save others from the same fate.
There's a reason why the early parts of the year are traditionally known as a dumping ground for studios. Because it is. A good deal of the stuff released at this time is done so because it's the furthest possible time between this year's Oscars and next year's...allowing studios plenty of time to distance themselves from bad films before the noms come out. Cloverfield is no exception to this trend. Borrowing liberally from films such as The Blair Witch Project, the recent Godzilla remake, and every horror movie you've seen where the main characters act completely illogically and are knocked off one by one, Cloverfield fails to meaningfully deliver on its goal of taking the big monster film down to the level of the individual "ordinary" people caught up in the wake of an attack.
It fails mostly because it fails to make us care at all about the central figures and their ludicrous quest to save a girl who is most likely already dead. I'll set aside the glaring logical inaccuracies (cell phones blacked out one moment, then working the next, cell phones working underground, extreme compression of basic New York geography...there's more but...), but I can't ignore the fact that for this little experiment to work, we have to care about these people who are running around doing really stupid things. Ostensibly, the first twenty minutes of the movie sets this up, within the thin framework of a party for the male lead. But all we really learn from it is that pretty much all the guys are kind of jerks, so no help there.
There's even an exact recreation of some 9/11 footage just to flavor the pot, which I found kind of offensive, and other New Yorkers might have too. I'd probably have been even more offended if the movie was any good. But it's terrible, so, there you go. Look, I wanted to like this movie. It was great promo. When I saw the trailer the first time I was really excited, as many of you probably were too. But i urge you to save your money on this one. Rent it if you must, the jerky camera-work and sub par story will be exactly the same on the small screen as the big screen.