Monday, June 16, 2008

Cloverfield










Todd Says:

1 STAR

I very nearly hated this movie. No wait a minute, maybe I did hate this movie. Lets see, we'll take the Blair Witch Project idea, set it in New York, and throw in Godzilla for good measure. Stir well, and what do you get.... Crap.

I'm sorry, but 90 minutes of shakey camcorder footage, the first 25 minutes of a rather boring social gathering, just don't do it for me. I know what they were trying to do: refresh a worn out movie archetype. The problem is they used a gimmick (yes, I called it a gimmick) that has already been used on another worn out movie archetype.

You can still make a good monster movie without gimmicks. People will still go and see them. But what happened here I think is that they replaced decent writing with a poor gimmick. So my final verdict (if you hadn't figured it out yet) is that you don't need to waste your time with this one.

Alexis says:

1.5 STARS

**Spoiler Alert**

The biggest problem I had with this movie was the headache that evolved from watching it 20 minutes in. At first I thought it was just me but after the movie several of the people we viewed it with (7 in total) said they had also gotten headaches. One of the people who had seen it before fell asleep to avoid motion sickness. When I want to feel woozy, I take bumps at fast speeds in my car or go to amusement parks not watch movies.

I liked the gimmick, though if you are thinking Blair Witch Project they definitely have their own feel (comparing the two would be like comparing Neo in the Matrix to River in Serenity in my opinion). This video recording is the only evidence left of a monster that destroyed New York City. The monster was a let down, it is just a large alien (think Rampage with the exception that this monster has little aliens that jump off of it (think Pitch Black)) destroying everything in it's path. I also felt that New York, Manhattan to be exact, cleared out pretty fast for a city of 1.5 million people being evacuated on foot and by helicopter.

Oh, and I don't think those people would have survived that helicopter crash.

2 comments:

James said...

I think the original title of this movie was "Obnoxious Twenty-Somethings Yell 'OH MY GOD' into a Handheld Camera for an Hour and a Half."

James said...

And speaking of handheld cameras, WHO ON PLANET EARTH HOLDS A CAMERA UP TO THEIR EYE THE ENTIRE TIME THEY'RE TRYING TO ESCAPE FROM AN APOCALYPTIC MONSTER THE SIZE OF A SMALL SKYSCRAPER?!?!