The Blair Witch Project for the kaiju community

Rating: 9/10 (3 July 2020)

I'm pretty sure once Cloverfield was released, everyone who saw it thought that it would be the "monster movie to end all monster movies", what with it being so far-removed from the cliched-but-familiar norm of the traditional giant monster movie formula by having the unique distinction of it being a survival horror thriller shot entirely in a found-footage documentary style (a novelty which really got overused and outstayed its welcome, over the course of the 2010s decade). When I watched it for the first time on home video, I didn't really like it all that much (probably because the idea of a "found-footage" format was still a relatively new concept to me, at the time). But as the years have gone by, I now see it as revolutionary masterpiece that actually made the kaiju genre feel genuinely scary again, after having numerous child-friendly, entertaining Godzilla and Gamera movies.
I think the film perfectly captures that same chaotic sensibility of a tragic 9/11-type disaster, in which your irrational paranoia gets the better of you and you feel totally disoriented standing in a large crowd of panicking bystanders running for their lives (it really does put the audience's mind into that perspective, to see firsthand how the destruction events occurred from the point-of-view of the petrified onlookers). I'm only assuming that director Matt Reeves drew upon some inspiration for this from the real-life 9/11 terrorists attacks, kind of like how Ishiro Honda was inspired to make the original Godzilla after the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
The filmmaker's made the smart decision to shoot the movie from a human's viewpoint with a handheld digital camera, as it makes the towering behemoth that's terrorising New York City seem more real and creates a foreboding mood (they use it to their maximum advantage). The most effective scenes where the film's "shaky-cam" cinematography looks best are when you're at ground-level looking up at the monstrous destruction or seeing it take place from a distance away, shrouded between the semi-demolished buildings. They also keep you in constant suspense by only giving brief glimpses of the creature's body (like an elbow here or a knee there), but they never relentlessly tease in the same way Gareth Edwards did with his murky Godzilla movie. And by the end of it all, there'll be a payoff that's been well worth the wait ("all good things come to those who wait", as they say). Even the titular monster itself has an otherworldly design, making it totally alien in appearance.
Without spoiling anything, I want to address a couple of complaints that people bring up when discussing this film, with the first one being "why do they still keep recording when a normal person would stop and put the camera down". I think it's just imbedded in our human behaviour to be naturally curious about any and all strange stuff we come across and instinctively want to document it down by recording the shockingly catastrophic events we bear witness to. Then there's the central young adult characters who honestly, I thought were passably serviceable to the film's plot and I didn't find them to be anymore annoying than any other mindless partygoer characters you'd normally see in most horror flicks out there (besides, the camera guy did give us a good dose of some much-needed levity, which I found to be a tad funny at times).
Another pet peeve of mine is when dumb people complain that "they didn't explain what the monster is or where it came from" (I'm getting so sick of hearing people say that). This should in no way be the slightest bit of an issue, because we don't need to know! The more knowledgeable you are about something, results drastically in you becoming less and less scared of the thing in question because then, at that point, you'll understand the creature too well and it'll start to take the essence of fear away from it being a creepy spine-chilling, unexplained mystery (it's the simple, age-old "fear of the unknown", which in-turn leaves it up to your own wicked imagination to fill in the blanks as what you don't see is often more scarier than what's right in front of your eyes).
Without ruining what happens, this rollercoaster thrill ride of an immersive cinematic experience (let's face facts, the movie was always best seen on the big-screen in a cinema with a quality sound system) ends on an exceedingly haunting high note, with the only piece of musical score heard in the whole film played over the credits. Composer Michael Giacchino's eerily classical operatic soundtrack truly evokes an immensely strong sense of dreadful hopelessness (it helps amplify the grim tone).
Rather than putting a permanent end to this worn-out, tired genre for good and let it rest in the past, Cloverfield was so popular that it singlehandedly managed to revitalise the interest in giant monster movies for a new generation of younger fans (once again, history has repeated itself because this situation is exactly like what happened with Wes Craven's Scream and how that brought about a rejuvenation of sorts to the stale, monotonous slasher sub-genre of horror films during the late-1990s and early-2000, as they made a big come back after the first one's release in 1996).