Hand-held camera passes inferior Godzilla rip-off as art.

Rating: 6/10 (29 January 2008)

When the trailer for this came out, I heard somebody in the audience say, "What is that? Another Godzilla movie?" Kind of. Unfortunately, kind of like the Matthew Broderick Godzilla box office disaster. In fact, I always thought that particular film would have received better reviews had it not been called a Godzilla film. Afterall, the monster didn't look at all like the traditional Godzilla, and the film took itself very seriously. It could have been called Cloverfield 1. The current Cloverfield film is very short, clocking in well under the standard hour and a half. Despite this, the first part of the film seems like an eternity. Half hour number one introduces us to the film's one dimensional...no, make that non-dimensional characters at a going away party. It also introduces us to a hand-held camera that is used throughout the entire film, generating more wooziness than the most avid Blair Witch hater could ever imagine. I wouldn't advise forking out 16 bucks on some stale popcorn/week old hot dog/flat soft drink combo for this one! Your stomach will want immediate pay back. I will give that awful hand-held camera credit for one thing, though. It sure is a tough little gizmo. It's outer casing survives monsters, falling bricks, explosions, the army, and an air raid that levels Manhattan. But that camera keeps going and going and going. So do the characters. That's all they do. They run and scream and shout and run and scream and shout. People are dying all around them, but all that matters to the film's "hero" and his pals is going back to save a girlfriend he got into an argument with at the beginning of the film. His friends don't take too much persuading to accompany him in this futile quest either, but then again, who wouldn't blindly follow an unfleshed out character on a collision course with a giant monster that's been killing everyone in sight? Not surprisingly, the friends get picked off one by one...yawn. Too bad you see so much of these disposable characters and not very much of the monster which is barely glimpsed at for the most part. When it is seen, the big guy looks like CGI. Night Of The Demon had it right, less is more when an on screen monster doesn't do justice to the off-screen fright it is supposed to evoke. There are a couple of "whoah!" moments in Cloverfield involving smaller insects which spew off of the big one for no reason other than to have something to chase the kids indoors and add some gross out moments. (Come to think of it, weren't there little Godzilla monsters in the Matthew Broderick Godzilla movie as well? Hmmmm.) Toho's Godzilla films are for the most part fun and campy. Cloverfield is basically a serious attempt at a giant monster flick. It's really just an artsy fartsy Godzilla film with 80% of it's time taken up by annoying college aged blank canvases either saying nothing much (that going away party, which was filmed as if you were there, was so dull that if I was an invite I would have left long before any monster ever showed up!) or huffing and puffing while running, screaming, and orally implying vague happenings that aren't shown on camera. I can't believe this nothingness has gotten such great reviews on this site. It has a few scares and moments of "what's going on!", but far too many lulls, repetitions, and nothing actually going on a whole lot of the time, a fact you'll realize if you close your eyes and actually stop letting the hand-held motion camera trickery fool you for a few seconds while trying not to vomit from dizziness. If you do see this one, grab some motion sickness meds and leave all analytical thinking out the door. Questions as to why there's a monster, why college educated people would go up on a roof during an earthquake, why little monsters are falling off the big one, why cell phone batteries die so easily and camera batteries do not, (etc.) have no place during this frill ride. If you think too much, sorry to say but you'll fall into a plot hole, not a hole caused by an inferior CGI Godzilla wannabe. Despite all the negativity I've stated, I give this one 5.5 out of 10, meaning, like most films, it's just a middling time waster to be seen once and never again. There are a few genuine critter jolts and some very nice building disaster special effects. It just isn't worth the raves on this site. I was unpleasantly surprised and disappointed after hearing so many overly positive reviews. (As time has passed, it's obvious that IMDb is no longer a place to go to base your decision on whether to see a new movie or not. A bulk of first reviews here are written by hired guns to get people to show up at the box office. The other vast majority of reviews on here are by people who love certain movies almost with an obsession. Trust only the ones that briefly describe the plot and tell you a few pros and cons so that you can decide if such a movie will appeal to you or turn you off. Only you can truly decide in the end, but at least the latter kind of reviews can help determine a rental versus spending a fortune at the theater.)