Cloverfield

I just finished watching Cloverfield, mostly because of all of the positive reviews I'd seen for it, and I'm here to tell you it's terrible. It can best be described as Godzilla meets the Blair Witch Project. How can combining aspects of two such highly acclaimed films go wrong you ask? Well, where to begin...

First of all, the movie is all about a freshly hatched 300 foot tall monster that is spooked and terrorizing Manhattan. Where did it come from, the ocean depths, or maybe space? Nobody knows. If it's that big, how is it that nobody noticed an enormous egg, or an even more enormous mother? How does something that size just appear out of nowhere in the most populated city in the country unnoticed? What the hell does the name Cloverfield have to do with anything? No attempts are ever made to explain any of these questions.

And like a Godzilla movie, the entire plot consists of running from a big monster. Actually it had less plot than Godzilla. And like Blair Witch, the entire movie is shot from the perspective of a group of idiots with a hand held camera. They aren't quite as annoying as Blair Witch, but they are still exceptionally annoying. And though the acting quality is better than Blair Witch, it is still deplorable.

But the biggest problem for me was the hand held camera. I really hate shaky hand held camera shots that film makers seem to be in love with these days, and this movie was entirely filmed in shaky cam. It may have had the best special effects ever, but I'll never know because I couldn't see anything that was going on for the majority of the film. Had I known about that going in, I would never have watched it. If you are prone to sea sickness, I imagine this movie will make you nauseous. I can't begin to express my hatred for hand held cameras.

My final complaint is that for an action movie, the first 25 minutes of character development are plodding and torturous. Most of it comprised of an idiot walking around an awkward party with a camera interviewing bad actors. I would gladly take 25 minutes of water torture over watching that again. This movie had absolutely no redeeming qualities that I can think of. One of the worst movies I've seen that didn't have Jim Carey in it.