Not nearly as good as trailer hyped it up to be

Rating: 3/10 (7 April 2008)

So lets just get this part out of the way; Cloverfield is most likely the most well advertised movie I've seen in the past few years. The teaser trailer shows two awesome clips; a distant building being blown apart accompanied by large chunks flying past the camerman, and the Statue of Liberty's head tumbling through the streets of manhattan. Now for those of you who viewed the trailer, you'll notice that in between these scenes, you see about 4 ridiculously quickly cut shots of people running down a stairwell. Guess What? That wasn't done just for the trailer... its actually one continuous scene in the movie.
Thats just one example of the irritating Blair Project-Rip Off of a movie that Cloverfield is. While the 1999 horror movie used the first person camera perspective as a way to trick the viewers to thinking that the movie was an actual documentary, Cloverfield uses this to make sure the audience gets the blurriest, and quickest shots possible of the limited amount of special effects in the movie. And as if that wasn't irritating enough, the camera man is retarded. I could most likely tape my digital camera to the top of my dogs ass while forcing him to run on my treadmill for a piece of steak and STILL get a better shot than the moron who recorded this movie. *end rant* Okay, with that out of the way lets focus on the movie's plot.
Oh wait... there isn't one. You see the other reason why I hate this movie so much is the fact that it scored a 7.8 on this website while Godzilla scored a 4.6. Because that makes a lot of sense. Okay sure, Godzilla may have had its issues with a couple of actors, and maybe all of the fans complained about him not breathing fire, but at least it had a plot.
Cloverfield opens up with a good 25 minutes of absolute irrelevant crap. The writers attempted to have some character development, but it never really works, or for that case matters in a movie with such ordinary boring characters. Have you ever gone over a girlfriend or boyfriends house and got stuck watching one of their god awful home movies? Well thats what this is... a really bad, boring home movie.
As far as the special effects go, they work... although theirs never anything really special about them, as most of the time the creature is covered in smoke, or so dark that you can't even see any texture on its skin etc. They aren't bad but theirs so few of them due to the ridiculous budget constraints, and that just sucks in a movie with such an epic scope.
The best part about this movie was its 85 minute run time... because when it ended, I got the hell out of that theater.
For the love of god, save your money 3/10