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Jan 20, 2008
Cloverfield Owes Me a Movie
A much more accurate Cloverfield movie poster
I'll try to keep this post as spoiler-free as possible, but believe me when I tell you there's not much to spoil. As I'm sure you have heard, Cloverfield is a new monster movie set in NYC that has had the internet hype machine redlining, these past few months.
The "plot" of Cloverfield is centered around a bunch of hipsters who are throwing a going away party for a friend, before he leaves for Japan to take on a new job. During said party, mysterious crashes and explosions occur and everyone loses their shit. Turns out some monster of indiscriminate origin has decided to make the island of Manhattan its new stomping ground. The rest of the movie follows a group of hapless dolts running around the city making poor life decisions and the chaos that ensues.
As I'm sure you can guess from the tone of this post, I was less than impressed with the results. First off, the entire movie is shot from the perspective of someone carrying around a (rather rugged) handheld camera and who takes it upon himself to document the whole horrific affair. What does that mean for the audience? A lot of shaky camera angles and great shots of peoples' pants.
There's no real grand story trying to be told in Cloverfield, it's just a romp through a disaster zone with a few somewhat annoying characters and no real attempt to explain how or why a giant creature is wrecking havoc in NYC.
Clocking in at a mere 84 minutes, Cloverfield can barely be called a feature. In the end, I know I paid for 2 tickets, got some popcorn and a soda, but walked out of the theater feeling that I was still owed a movie.
I think I liked Drew Goddard a lot more when he was writing episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
Posted by Ferry on 01/20/2008 12:31 PM in Bitching, Cinema