What happens when a monster comes out of nowhere and interferes in the life of yuppies in New York City? They act stupid and die. That is the lesson one learns from the movie Cloverfield.
Because of a massive viral campaign, there was a lot of buzz made about Cloverfield. What will the monster look like? How much will the movie reflect 9-11? How realistic will the film actually be with its trick photography, trying to make the audience believe it is watching footage recovered from a camera which filmed the Cloverfield incident in New York City?
As one would expect with a film like this, there really is not much to it. The film is as simple as it sounds. The characters, alas, are simpler. We get caricatures, nothing more. There is the guy who wants to save his girlfriend’s life; there is his friend, filming the events as they run around the city, as the small group of friends try to save the girl. There is the morose girl who the cameraman wants to date, but who seems completely uninterested in him. There is the monster which just wants to move around the city without being shot at. Its young, its hungry, and it has monster fleas bugging it to no end. You do get to see it, but it is not too impressive looking when you do.
For some reason, I decided to go see the film. I was bored, couldn’t concentrate on my work, and just needed to go out vegetate. Except for people who get motion sickness, Cloverfield is a good film to do that with. Don’t go in expecting much, and you will be satisfied. Go in expecting anything more than mindless drivel, go in believing that this will be an original take on the giant monster genre of films, and you will be disappointed. It’s not anything new. It’s not too intelligent. You don’t really get to like the characters. You don’t care whether or not they live. You don’t come out knowing what the monster really is, where it came from and what is going to happen to it next (and making it open ended like that is not an ingenious move by the scriptwriter, it’s laziness).
If I said more about the film, more about the characters, more about the so-called plot twists, you would really have nothing left to see. If a monster taking out New York City is your idea of a good time, I don’t want to ruin any excitement you might have by revealing too much. If it isn’t then you won’t really care.
The movie gets two out of four stars. It’s not great, but it’s not really bad. It’s really average. It did leave me feeling like I experienced a city being leveled out, but it also made me think, why can’t they ever show bright people in movies like this? Then maybe the film would have something new to offer.
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