Cloverfield

Rating: 7/10 (26 January 2008)

Cloverfield is about a group of young adults who while having a party discover that some enormous creature is rampaging through the streets and that buildings are being destroyed and people are dying. The film features only a handful of main characters fleeing from the monster and one of them has a hand-held camera with him, so basically what he films is what we see. There were things I liked about Cloverfield and some things that only made it an okay film for me instead of a great one. The whole idea of a film being seen from the hand-held camera point of view isn't exactly new, but I thought the filmmakers did an interesting twist with this and it gave us a more personal side to the people running from the creature. While the hand-held camera movements were very shaky and did make me kind of motion sick and nauseated, I still appreciated this original way of storytelling and handling the movie. Another thing I liked about the film is that even though it is released by a big mainstream distributor and got a wide release, it didn't really feel like a big Hollywood movie at all because of how everything happened realistically and for a monster film it didn't really feel all that preposterous at times because of how real the characters, their situation and how they handled it was. Also there are not a lot of big fancy special effects, or camera tricks here making the film look more gritty and real. Because the film is not predictable and doesn't suffer from old horror movie formulas that have been done to death I applauded the film for it's original take on this genre of film as well as the direction and storytelling. Other than making me a bit nauseated, which I don't count as a negative feeling for the movie the only real problem I had with the film is that it started to drag a bit in the middle and the suspense and intensity of the film as well as the characters really started to die off for me in the second half. Had it been a little more suspenseful and had a little bit more action, or just anything else to keep my interest up, it would have made this film a really good one rather than just an okay one. Still, I was pleased that a mainstream Hollywood company would release a film as different and original as this, so I can say that that impresses me, but the film itself is only okay and I do feel it could have been a bit better.