A well done film, but slow to start

Rating: 8/10 (23 April 2008)

Although I never bought into the whole Blair Witch phenomena, I still enjoy unusual "point of view" films, whether they be simulated newscasts like Special Bulletin and Without Warning, or films like Cloverfield that let you make-believe that you're in some awful alternate universe watching actual documentary footage of an apocalypse.
I never saw Cloverfield in the theatre, just on DVD, but I get the feeling the film plays a lot better on the small screen. After all, it is built around home-video footage and that's not the type of stuff really intended for the big screen. As such, it's quite an absorbing ride. I've heard people complain about plot holes, and things being unexplained, etc. I just read one professional review that says the film should have broken away from the first-person occasionally. These types of complaints obviously miss the entire point of the film. The characters never got any answers, so why should we? (At least, not until the sequel!)
I do have to complain a little about the first 15 minutes or so. I really dislike the "character building" prologues that seem to be obligatory in so many disaster films. I've seen some movies (Towering Inferno comes to mind) that go damn near an hour before the actual main event happens. So often these scene-setters are pretty dull, and Cloverfield's is no exception, save for a couple of funny moments and the introduction of Marlena. Especially with a movie like this, I think a quicker "cut to the chase" would have been a better idea, and any character building could have been handled either by the characters as they progressed through the crisis (a good example of one such moment in the film is Marlena joking with Hud about Superman and Garfield), or by simply expanding on the plot point that once in awhile we see an earlier section of tape recorded about a month earlier.
The cast do the best they can with what is, by its very nature, very limiting material. Lizzy Caplan's Marlena is a standout character who I wish was given more to do (the actress reminds me very much if Moira Kelly in a few scenes, too), and Michael Stahl-David does a great job as Rob Hawkins (I wonder if it's intentional or a coincidence that the character has the same name as Rob Hawkins in another end-of-the-world production, Jericho?). And TJ Miller as Hud, despite spending most of the time behind the camera, manages to be both "documenter" and comic relief in some pretty dire circumstances.
Incidentally they missed a bet with the DVD; instead of keeping the film in its theatrical "filmized" look, I was hoping it would revert back to the original video look, which would have made things look even more realistic. Oh well.
According to the DVD, JJ Abrams was inspired by Gojira. He was also obviously inspired by 9/11 (the scene where the heroes take refuge in a store from an advancing wall of collapsed- building dust is almost beat-for-neat identical to footage I remember of a similar take-cover situation on 9/11. Will Cloverfield be remembered as a document responding to a traumatic event, the way Gojira/Godzilla was a direct response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki? There's no way to tell right now. It will be remembered as one heck of a monster movie, and a noble (if not always 100% successful) experiment in film-making.