Godzila Meets the Blair Witch Project

Rating: 7/10 (3 June 2009)

It could have been a very banal horror movie. Or it could have been a special effects blockbuster. Yet director Matt Reeves chose to do something different here. He put a video camera in the hands of one of his rather uninteresting yuppie characters and pretended that the whole film is a documentary starting with a good-bye party in Manhattan and continuing with a monster attack that plunges into pure horror, sometimes looking painfully similar to the amateur shots of the terror attacks on 9/11.
This improbable combination works better than expected. The amateur camera pretext beautifully compensates for the low budget of the special effects. With the course of action cut every few seconds by the pretended lack of skills of the camera handler or better said handlers the linearity and simplicity of the characters are hidden and the holes of the plot not so evident. We never see too much of the monster because as soon as we see him the human holding the video camera needs to run for his life, but this adds to the unknown of the story. And by the end it looks like the camera may be the only survivor of the bloody series of events.
This film could have been yet another teen horror or monster flick. It tries, dares, and succeeds to be something different.