Click Here For Our Interview with Mike Vogel
Click Here For Our Interview with Lizzy Caplan
Click Here For Our Interview with T.J. Miller

Cloverfield

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

I was fully expecting Cloverfield to be bad. There was all that hype – the title-less trailer attached to Transformers last summer, the cryptic websites, all the online conjecture – and all it amounted to, it seemed, was a generic monster movie that promised to make you throw up with shaky camerawork. Actually, as I walked into the theater, I was downright dreading it.

That kind of lowered expectation, I think, set me free enough so that I could really enjoy it. Cloverfield turns out to be professional, solid, clever entertainment. It won’t shatter your senses into a million pieces or change filmmaking forever, but it’s a good movie.

The first twenty minutes or so are basically an extended version of that famous first trailer: shot through a hand-held video camera by one of the characters, Blair Witch-style, a bunch of trendy twentysomething New Yorkers gather at a surprise going away party for a guy named Rob, who’s moving to Japan (presumably a nod to Godzilla, which this movie was obviously inspired by). They hear something, see an explosion in the distance, run out of the apartment building, and almost get mowed over by the head of the Statue of Liberty bouncing down the street.

Then, the perfect touch: everybody whips out their camera phone and begins snapping pictures of the head. Yes, as much as this is a big monster-attacks-Manhattan movie, it’s also a movie about today’s self-involved generation that is lost without Facebook accounts and high-speed Internet. (I’m not dating myself; I’m one of them.) The entire film is a pitch-perfect simulation of what a YouTube video of a monster attack would look like.

Of course, director Matt Reeves and writer Drew Goddard slide enough sly narrative touches to make this more bearable than a bunch of rich kids shouting “OMG!” for 80 minutes. (J.J. Abrams, who’s getting all the press for this, came up with the concept and served as the producer.) While the entire movie is shot on a hand-held camera held by the affable Hud (T.J. Miller), a few wide shots and helicopter shots are slipped in thanks to news reports on televisions that the characters walk by. And in a clever framing device, the footage we’re watching is taping over some old footage of the main romantic leads, Rob (Michael Stahl-David) and Beth (Odette Yustman) – so whenever Hud shuts off the camera during some dire circumstance, we’re treated to a brief contrasting scene of the two happy lovebirds.

While that love story is an attempt to provide give these people personalities, it doesn’t really work. We don’t really care about Beth (who’s initially unlikable and is really given barely any lines to remedy that impression) or Rob (who sounds, randomly enough exactly like Mark ...