Cloverfield: An hour and a half of pure awesomeness

So I saw Cloverfield this weekend, and I loved it. It's fucking great. I have just one caveat:

If you get motion sick, this may not be the movie for you. The whole thing is filmed first-person perspective as if it was through a hand-held cam-corder type thing. It's like Blair witch, only more so.

That being said, I'll now engage in some spoilers and such.

*SPOILER ALERT*

Ok...here we go.

The movie is great. Everything about it is great. Even the marketing leading up to the movie is great. The characters are just regular New York City 20-something somewhat self-absorbed regular people. There's no "superhero" stuff like there was in War of the Worlds, with Tom "Shithead" Cruise blowing up alien war machines with hand grenades.

Unlike most monster movies where the whole thing is filmed from the perspective of the military and world leaders trying to deal with a massive world threat, and one or two cameos of running screaming Japanese looking up and backwards, this one is filmed entirely from the angle of a handful of poor bastards trying to avoid getting squished or eaten.

The carnage and destruction is incredible. There's no shitty soundtrack, the movie is immersive and pulls you in. The monster itself is pretty good. It's nothing groundbreaking, as the whole "Giant Critter Smashes City" genre has been worked over about a thousand times. Even the smaller critters it spawns aren't completely original. They kind of remind me of critters from the Half Life game franchise, as others have mentioned on the net. In fact, some super-nerd even mentioned that they think some music from Half life is played in an electronics store at some point, but that's probably reaching a bit.

So it's not the material itself that's new and awesome, it's how it's handled, and how it's filmed.

Even better, they don't wimp out on the ending. A lot of movies of this type, like the afore mentioned War of the Worlds, which I admit I enjoyed quite a bit, tend to go all weak and let all the main characters live in the end - Unlike the movie The Mist, which was a great (if significantly lower budget) monster horror genre movie where the ending is hard as nails and more fucked up than Brittany Spears.

One thing I'm not looking forward to is the inevitable follow up material. I'm sure there will be some sort of shitty sequel that JJ Abrams won't be involved in and will most certainly suck, sort of like episodes of Lost after he went off to work on other projects.

I'm also not looking forward to all of the super-fanboy analysis of the movie. I've already read some of it, where people start doing careful analysis and listening to the little message at the end of the film and such, and trying to figure out what's actually going on. Some of it is cool, but in a way it'll detract from this movie when you just take it for what it is without getting into the "mythology" of it. Sort of like the Cthulhu mythos, which was good until later authors starting categorizing and defining everything and removing the mystery of it.

So to sum up, this movie is great. It's awesome. It's worth seeing in the theater, just because of how immersive it is and how much more involved you'll feel in front of a giant screen. But you might want to bring some dramamine... :wink: