Beverly Hills 902 9:11 meets Godzilla Crab Witch, via a pointless Lost plot

Rating: 2/10 (18 January 2008)

Most of the audience in the screening I attended with my wife (we're both ardent horror and sci-fi film fans) giggled (i was too stunned by how bad it was to laugh) whilst the 19yr (ish) kid 3 seats down kept gasping 'oh my god' sitting on the edge of his seat.
I pity that kid and how easily entertained his generation is by smoke and mirrors that only lead to yet more smoke and mirrors (incidentally, like Shaymalan before him, producer JJ Abrams seems stuck using this tedious trick) Cloverfield spectacularly fails its very own premise : a monster movie shot in a faux documentary style(and you would have to be pretty willfully stupid to not see how obviously it feeds on 9/11 fear using incredibly similar angles as the TV footage we all saw that day).
Here's the problem - to be real, you must commit. But we are presented with a cast of one dimensional cyborg 'beautiful young things' who are all impossibly perfect and all just so 'cool' hanging out together like they've all just stepped out of a alcohol ad. Their dialog feels empty, trite and fake and directly at odds with the direction of the film. OK so this is real? Why are these people just like the bad actors we see in so many other movies? We care about people with imperfections, we immediately want to see clichés like this die as soon as possible. (something Starship Troopers understood perfectly). Yes real life is mundane, but its not nearly THIS mundane or plastic.
We are fairly successfully teased by snatches of the monster when it arrives, but why it seems to be selectively picking on certain bridges and buildings, much less why it seems to confine itself all night and in the relatively small area of Manhattan seems not so much a mystery but just an embarrassing void of sense we're not meant to notice because of the unfolding 'terror'. Sadly the film is riddled with silliness that just sucks the air out of any potential for true terror or fear. Electricity seems to magically continue working where it shouldn't, digital cameras are now stronger than the tanks being squashed...the 'realistic' camera shaking neatly settles down for the corny 'hero saves girl' scene in the toppling building 'set'. The monster, despite the fact we can clearly now see it's scale and position, seems able to reach much higher into the sky to knock a helicopter down.
OK so you think that's just me being picky? Here's a reminder..remember we're being presented this as a 'hyperreal' account, thats the extra big SCARE right? How can you hope to do that when you are trapped by Hollywood contrivance and cheese...the answer is you cant.
In some ways the film is bold, there is no music. But even here there are problems...we get Hollywood style sound design and effects. So again, it's raw but utterly pretentious.
Some of the CGI is quite skillful, some looks downright phony. But in the end, unless you are easily amused (and many are) you feel the film is a conceit that just didn't work. You feel cheated the way many Lost fans (and before this i had NO opinion on the projects of Abrams) seemed to when the box within a box trick just became boring.
There is some suspense created in the tunnel scenes (which felt uncomfortably loaned from some other film) but overall this is neither a scary or effective film.
Since reading some of the reviews here though, i have realised the film's true capacity for terror : you can actually fool a lot of the people a lot of the time with the most paper thin ideas by simply remixing genres and techniques. When the smoke and mirrors clear up, we are not left with a classic of any genre, just a blancmange of cheap tricks we've seen before in different and more effective incarnations.
There's nothing in the box, just more boxes.