"Do you want cheese with your monster...?"

Rating: 2/10 (16 January 2008)

When Lars Von Trier was preaching his Dogma manifesto all those years ago, I'll bet my left nut he didn't think it would be embraced to create Hollywoods latest pile of steaming, stinking celluloid, Cloverfield.
Take out the 12 minute credit crawl (arguably the most exciting thing in the film), and you get 73 minutes of headache-inducing hand-held camera-work, a monster that would've been best left unseen and a whiny group of objectionable Manhattanites, everyone of them perfectly suited - nay, deserving - of a fate between the backteeth of any monstrous beasty.
I was hoping the brave creative decision to shoot the whole film from a first-person perspective would have the desired affect - put the audience into the action; redefine the disaster/monster movie for the post 9/11 generation; take genre pics to that next level that many promise to do but none ever really have.
But in trying to provide realism to B-movie myths of years gone by, the film-makers only manage to emphasise the cornball situations and horrible clichés that have driven these films for decades. You can make the camera-work as dandy as you like, but it don't mean squat if the script and acting is every bit as turgid and wooden as it was 50 years ago - when the giant octopus (an obvious inspiration for Cloverfields critter) crawled over the bridge and headed Downtown.
I know we have to give a movie about a marauding jellyfish a little slack, but its not the monster scenes that stink. It's the oh-so-lame set-up of the characters lives that is insufferably eye-rolling from the very first frame of the film. The intimacy your personal video camera captures isn't like a movie, so a movie about the intimacy a video camera captures was never going to ring true. The achingly slow story suffers from awkwardly staged moments meant to look spontaneous, weepy declarations of love and McGuyver-style heroics. The producer's could've saved big bucks on all the military hardware on display in the film - with the cheese in Cloverfield laid on so thick, the monster would've eventually died of cholesterol poisoning anyway.....
It's hard to totally hate a film that tries to make something new out of an idea so old but, minus all the new technology that has gone into creating this screeching, lurching mess, Cloverfield is no better than the monster flicks that your mom and dad watched in double-bills at their local drive-in.
When the only positive you can take from a film is the viral, pre-release marketing strategy innovatively employed, somethings up. Cloverfield is an admirable attempt but ultimately proves an immense failure.