Another movie that doesn't deserve the rating it has.

Rating: 4/10 (25 January 2008)

I read many of the user comments before deciding to chime in myself instead of just rating the movie. For starters, I want to clarify something. Many comments criticize the seemingly endless battery life of the camcorder. Having done a fair amount of videography (both for personal use and professionally), I can tell you that getting 73 minutes out of a camcorder battery (particularly a high capacity battery) is not a stretch. Comments have mentioned the "7 hour" battery life of the camcorder but failed to consider the actual amount of footage shot (again, 73 minutes worth). It's not like the camera ran continuously for 7 or so hours and then someone ran home, edited it down in Final Cut and then returned to Central Park to die in a nuclear explosion. One of my pro-sumer cameras can easily do 90 minutes with a single, fully charged, high capacity battery. And, with the appropriate length, all the footage can fit on one tape. If anything, the only stretch is how durable the camera seems to be (but again, not impossible). With all that aside, here's my review.
Whoever said this wasn't done before obviously hasn't seen or heard of the Blair Witch Project. It's the same basic concept except the shooter here wasn't shooting a student film. Oh, by the way, another user also commented about how BWP bombed. Well, $140,530,000 is not too shabby for a movie that cost extremely little to make. Anyway, getting back to the subject, Cloverfield manages to pull off the whole "handheld cam" thing better than Blair Witch did. It's unfortunate, however, because the shaky camera actually obscures some of the nice CGI work. The opening 15-20 minutes was another big waste. It seemed like they only came up with 60 pages of script (if you can call this movie scripted) and needed to fill in some time to actually try to get close to being feature length. It reminded me of the opening of Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof" with the drawn out conversation between the characters in the car in the beginning of the movie. Once the story gets moving, things improved somewhat. As others have mentioned, it was reminiscent of some of the 9/11 footage we saw with people running from the towers and the dust cloud when they came down. That, to me, helped build up some tension. There are some inconsistencies, not the least of which are the subway attack on our 4 characters by the smaller creatures where only one person gets bitten or infected. The rescued girlfriend's amazing recovery to the point of being able to run almost on her own is another example and the whole surviving the helicopter crash virtually unscathed comes immediately to mind as well. It's not like I wasn't expecting to suspend reality (this is a monster movie after all), but let's not push the envelope. The acting was generally what I expected from a bunch of people acting like they are in a critical, life-or-death struggle. No big-name actors made the whole "these are everyday ordinary people" situation more believable. Ultimately, some background details, perhaps from the military perspective, would have been nice. Even some after-the-fact details to explain what happened to the creature after the nuclear blast. Did it move on to New Jersey or head out to the Hamptons for some R&R after laying waste to NYC.
All said, this movie will not last very long at the box office once word of mouth gets around as to how disappointing it is. Most will not have a good time with the shaky-cam footage and will be upset about the short run time as well. I wouldn't go so far as to say the movie was terrible or awful, but in my opinion, it falls way short of living up to the hype. I think a second viewing at home once the DVD comes out will be in order to see if the film is more tolerable on the small screen.