Review

Monster!  Quick, let’s run towards it!

Cloverfield is a throwback to the Godzilla error.  A large monster terrorizes a major city and people flee impending doom.  But this movie isn’t just a monster movie, no, it also has what many people call the “queasy-cam” or when an actor films the video holding the camera instead of having a stationary camera.  An example of the queasy-cam is the Blair Witch Project.  Oh, there was also another element that separated this movie from other movies.  Civilians run towards the monster, not away from it.

Now I was hoping it was a Godzilla movie from a civilians perspective, but sadly it was just some generic monster.  The movie was quiet scary at times, that is, before you get a good look at the monster.  I always found that the mind crafts scarier monsters then any Hollywood could ever hope to create. 

While I read other reviews for this movie, I noticed some other critics complaining about not ever being told where the monster came from, other praise it.  I, personally, don’t think it is an essential part of the movie.  After all, how are civilians going to know that kind of information?  I do have a few questions about how certain people survive, though.  For instance, they run towards the monster to save a friend.  Only to find her impaled by a rebar through the left lung.  She seems dead a first, but then miraculously wakes up, at least two or three hours after she called the others telling them that the wall collapsed in her apartment.  Then they, against all common knowledge, decide to pull her off of the bar, which they do, and she still is in good enough health to run around the city without showing an ounce of pain.

Now many critics talk about “9/11 references” with the attack in Manhattan, and the destruction of sky scrapers.  Personally I don’t see it.  I feel that if one does find a connection to that day it is because they wanted to so they fabricated their own references and then they said it was distasteful.  I didn’t even think of that until I read their reviews.  I feel that it was necessary, to set it in a major coastal city because if the movie where set on some backwoods Colorado ranch, without anybody living near the attack for 15 miles, I feel that would make it a very boring movie and limit the monster’s speculated origins.  So we established that the movie has to be set in a coastal city because many people live there and it gives the options of a space origin, or an ocean one.  Any as for the destruction of skyscrapers, do the critics think a monster is just going to mosey around town eating people and destroying all the McDonald’s and seven elevens and manage to carefully avoid touching the skyscrapers for fear of hurting our feelings?

I think that this movie is a great monster movie with very scary some very parts.  And it has a great twist, but I can’t tell you that.  I recommend it to anybody who wants to see a decent monster movie, and I give it 5.5 stars out of 7.

The lovable band of extremely unwise civilians is played by Michael Stahl-David, T.J. Miller, Jessica Lucas, Lizzy Caplan, Lizzy Caplan, Mike Vogel, and Odette Yustman.