"Cloverfield" Movie Review

This week we watched the J.J. Abrams produced, Matt Reeves directed thriller Cloverfield (R). Seen entirely through a handheld video camera, Cloverfield documents a night when New York City is attacked by some sort of giant monster and all of the ensuing chaos.

Ryan: It is has been awhile since I’ve been so conflicted about a movie. Cloverfield, from the film to my expectations of it, is draped in contradictions. On the surface the movie seems fresh and original but ultimately has a story that is about as traditional as a Hollywood story gets. It’s a film that promised a big payoff (of some kind) but didn’t deliver. It's a film that looks like it was made on the cheap side but in fact has a strong production value. My biggest dilemma with the movie is that I respect what the filmmakers did but don’t feel the need to go out and tell people that they have to watch this movie right away.

Andy: First of all, I was very entertained by Cloverfield. The entire movie is a gimmick, and sometimes that can be disastrous for a movie, but this one held up pretty well the entire time. As Ryan was alluding to, the inventive nature of the movie is what makes it worth watching. It’s nothing that hasn’t really been done before (Blair Witch Project), but the idea of having a movie that is simply a “found” piece of video is intriguing enough that it can work in moderation. If a whole lot of movies like this start coming out it will be annoying, but it nice to see someone play with this (sub)genre every 8-10 years or so.

Ryan: It is only credible to address the movie in the framework of the internet-driven marketing campaign which--at least for me--did hype up my desire to see the movie. From the very beginning the movie was cloaked in secrecy. The speculation ran rampant that it might be Godzilla or even a Voltron movie. And while those notions now seem completely ridiculous, there is no doubt that in the back of my mind I was expecting some sort of mind-blowing revelation with regard to what was going on in the movie. Normally I have nobody but myself to blame when my expectations go out of whack but in this I case I feel somewhat deceived.

Andy: It is clear that the way the movie was advertised had a strong affect on many moviegoers perception of the movie. For me, it was clear that something big is attacking New York City, and we are seeing through the eyes of an ordinary person with a video camera. I would have actually preferred less of a payoff than the movie ends up giving. We end up getting more information and better views of the monster than I expected. With an ad campaign shrouded in mystery, I would have liked to see the events of the movie remain fairly clouded even at the end.

Ryan: In the You Tube world that we live in it shouldn't be to surprising that a movie would come along and raise the bar that the Blair Witch Project set some eight-plus years ago. The fact that Abrams and company were able to shoot a melodrama-driven monster movie on nothing but hand held cameras with a largely unknown cast is impressive. Although the movie made me borderline nauseous at times with the amateur-ish camera work, Cloverfield does succeed in being different from the majority of genre pictures that make it to the silver screen. Ultimately I'm still processing exactly what the difference truly means.

Andy: Ultimately, Cloverfield is a clever piece of work. At times it seems to be focusing too much on the story of the people involved instead of the madness happening in the city around them. The “video” that the audience is watching is taped over a video one of the characters made of a random day a few weeks earlier, and occasionally a few seconds of that video creep into the disaster video. The device is effective, as it allows us to see some of the characters humanized in brief snippets. Just like the movie as a whole, it doesn’t work perfectly, but it is both entertaining and interesting.

Cloverfield is not great, but it is different enough that it is worth watching. Final grade: B-.