REVIEW: Cloverfield

Cloverfield the new monster movie that took the weekend box office by storm (a reported $41 Million) is a fun movie...pay no attention to what my father thinks!

I hit up the movie theatre this weekend for a long overdue movie night. Not a lot out there that I wanted to see! But, low and behold, what has a 01-18-08 release date (happy birthday to me) CLOVERFIELD.

As I said a few weeks ago, for a movie with little, or no, traditional advertising....I was looking forward to this movie. Now...if you haven't seen the movie yet you may want to stop reading now.

SPOILER ALERT!!! SORT OF!!

Let me start off by saying that I truly enjoyed this movie. But!.....I know a lot of people will not agree with me. First off the camera "work" is a little hard to watch at times.

The man on the street approach is a very convincing style choice here. I think that it even works better than it did back in 1999 with The Blair Witch Project. But, like that movie Cloverfield does have a few short comings.

With the handheld home movie look you get a lot of times that the screen is unwatchable, especially if you have motion sickness issues. But, for the most part the feel of the movie is dead on.

What I really enjoyed was the point of view take this movie gives you. In the past "monster" movies were all about a battle between the unstoppable monster and the main characters....this time you get the view of the everyman just trying to get out of the monsters way...and stay alive in the process. Because of this fact we really only get a few really good look at the main monster itself. (don't want to give away too much!) This movie does a good job of showing the chaos at ground level for the average Joe!

The cast is made of up "mostly unknown" talent. But, if you have been watching a little TV over the last year or so you will recognize a few faces: Lizzy Caplan (from "The Class"), Michael Stahl-David (Black Donnellys), and Jessica Lucas (four episodes of CSI from this year) are the most recognizable faces in the cast and they all do an outstanding job.

A major distinction between Cloverfield and Blair Witch is that Cloverfield was scripted. Some of the dialogue is hokey...but when is a movie totally believable? Some of the best line in the movie come from T.J Miller (Hud, A.K.A. the Cameraman) While you really have to be paying attention to the dialogue rather than to the action....he has some killer lines.

My only true knock on the movie itself is that it spends too much time setting up the quasi-documentary feel. We get about twenty-minutes of setup footage of the going away party before the monster attack begins, and this is 20 minutes out of the total 88 minutes of the movie. I understand the overall reason for those 20 minutes...but I also don't need to get the full run down to get "emotionally attached" to the characters. The whole set up could have been done in 10 minutes and not lost it's effect.

All in all I would say that, while it won't win any awards, it is well worth seeing. If you were not all that impressed by Blair Witch...you may want to sit this one out. The same goes for those people who suffer from motion sickness...

On a final note...stick around, not a big deal..but you may want to just for fun....also, if you are going to see the movie for the first time....or a second time for that matter! Pay attention to the Coney Island Footage near the end of the movie! If you don't have the patience, or money, to go back to the movie....check this out...it's audio from the very end of the credits. If you listen to the audio in the theatre it is supposed to sound like "help us" but if you play it backwards you get....well listen to it for yourself.