Cloverfield, or the longest lasting camcorder battery ever.  A review. **Updated with monster pic**

We get to know Rob, a hot young vice president of something, through his personal video recordings and through Hud, his friend who is documenting Robs going away party ‘cause he’s going to Japan to work there. Rob is in love with his long time friend Beth who, wouldn’t you know it, shows up at the party with another man. Rob gets sad and talks about love with his brother Jason. Then the shit hits the fan.

Something has rocked Manhattan island to its core and wants to do some more rocking as the panicking party goers witness New York landmarks get torn down all around them. What is it with giant monsters and landmarks? We then follow Rob and his three friends trying to get off the island but Rob also wants to rescue Beth who is stuck at another place on the island. Hud is documenting the whole thing with the sturdiest and longest lasting video camera in the world but has the tendency to look away from the action to look at his panic stricken friends instead.

As a giant monster fan I was somewhat disappointed with the lack of monster action in the film. The trailer leads you to believe that the film is brimming with hard core action but instead we get to hear how Rob loves Beth while the army is shooting rockets at the monster and Hud would rather film his friend than document the event as he so often declares in the film. I guess that’s one way of keeping the budget down.

The hand held camcorder look can be distracting at times, especially in afore mentioned scenes but it also gives the chaotic setting some realism and the FX in the film do a good job of making Manhattan look like hell on earth. There are a few money shots in the film but one hoped that would be more of them. I also noticed that there are few shots in the trailer that are not in the film, shots that couldn’t possibly be shot with the camcorder.

As for the monster. How does it look? Hmm. It’s hard to say because you don’t really get a good solid look at it the whole film. But what you did see looked very good and original. I look forward to seeing actual design sketches of the thing when it hits DVD.

**UPDATE**
Today the Icelandic newspaper 24 Hours published this picture of the monster. This is in fact the monster of the film and not any of the fakes that have been posted online in the last few months. I haven’t seen this online before, not that I have been looking really but at least this is the real deal.
Click here for a look at it.

The film is OK I guess, it’s far from the genius monster movie that we all thought we were getting. I like how the monster is never explained and that nobody is really thinking about where it came from or how. It just shows up and starts to tear shit up. Not many filmmakers, or studios more likely, dare to go that route these days and feel the need to explain everything for the less perceptive in the crowd and thus destroys all the mystery surrounding the situation.
I pretty much hated the whole love angle and it’s really hard to build up characters through this technique they are using or in this time frame. You don’t get emotionally involved with the main characters and therefore you don’t care if a character you’ve only seen for two or three minutes tops, lives or dies, just how he or she dies.

Director Matt Reeves is still in melodramatic TV land and doesn’t give the film the raw, gritty intensity it needs to succeed. The story of the film is big, gigantic even but the camcorder never gets that feeling through the lens and is instead claustrophic and is light on visual intensity, though the sound design does a pretty good job of conveying the mayhem outside the frame.

The cast does an OK job, all young and pretty and don’t curse allot. Nobody is overly panicky or behaves in a way one would think people would behave in a situation like this, especially in this political climate we are experiencing. Some of them even have the ability to run through a dark subway tunnel, chased by monsters, in stiletto heels. I wish I could do that.

I did however like the few monster scenes we got and while the film utilizes no music in the film itself we get a great music piece during the end credits thats a HUGE nod to Godzilla’s theme. I need to track down that song.

I’m sure this film will rake in the cash, at least in its first week so hopefully we’ll get a sequel thats more of a straight monster movie so us monster fans can get some true world shattering action.

Looking back at all the theories that people were throwing out there before the movie came out and how deeply they dived in to some mythology that wasn’t there it’s funny to see how utterly wrong everybody was. Again I hope this movie will make enough money to dwell in to the monster some more because it got me very curious.