So I finally managed to see Cloverfield. I had it Netflixed and tonight carved out eighty-five minutes to watch it. I had been interested in it because (A) it seemed cool and (B) it was a movie I knew practically nothing about. If I find one of those, I usually avoid previews and reviews like the plague, because just like George Castanza’s dad, I like to go in fresh!
Overall, I enjoyed it. I hadn’t seen a take on a monster movie like this, viewed purely from the point of view of the victims. That particular strength became a weakness, oh, about ten minutes in. One of the characters, Hud, got hoodwinked into filming the movie for his best friend’s going away party (and for the rest of the movie, essentially, so that we, the "ones left alive" could view it after the fact, a la Blair Witch). Hud took to his assignment like, well, like his job as an actor depended on it. And that was the problem. You quickly came to view Hud as a proxy for the filmers. His actions, which were largely questions stiffly framed to draw out exposition, came off as a clumsy attempt at painting him as part of the scenery. And that sentiment struck me before the beast showed up, which was an issue.
That being said, I new it wasn’t going to improve, so I simply suspended disbelief, and largely it worked. The story doled out the information in relatively small chunks, never giving too much away, but enough to keep the viewer interested. You never did get any sense of where this creature came from or why it had found itself in Manhattan. There was an overturned tanker, from which the monster liberated itself, and that was just about it. That in itself was cool. They stayed pretty tight to the point-of-view of these characters, who wouldn’t be privy to any of that information, and I appreciated that they stayed tightly within that frame.
The beastie had some tricks up its sleeve, too. It wasn’t just a run around and stomp on things creature, though it did plenty of that. It had babies, little Alienesque creatures that stormed through the darker parts of Manhattan. And they did Alien-like things after they bit you, too. I liked the effects quite a bit, and they weren’t overly gratuitous with them. They spaced them out between the more human-focusing scenes of the movie, never giving the thing too much airtime or daylight for that matter.
Here’s the other main problem I had with the movie, though. The monster? Man, did it have a lock on these characters. Wherever they went, there it was, giving them all the grief they could handle and more. I know, there’s no story without it, but when the monster follows them around, apparently by accident, it makes the viewer overly aware of the hand of the director, and just like the guy behind the camera, it was too present, especially in the middle and later portions of the movie.
But overall? I liked it. Don’t expect anything deep. It’s just a little diversion, but a tense and interesting and scary one at that.
I give it a B-
What about you?
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