Overpromised, Underdelivered

(NOTE: contains a couple of minor spoilers for the movie CLOVERFIELD)

The BF and I went to see Cloverfield today. I had HUGE hopes for this film. It was done by J. J.J. Abrams (of LOST and ALIAS and FELICITY fame, and heading up the upcoming STAR TREK flick) whose work I've really liked in the past. The trailers for Cloverfield were great.

The movie was, however, a big disappointment. The two biggest problems were the shooting, it's all done as if shot by a handheld videocam, and the characters, who were, at best, unsympathetic, and, at worst, downright annoying. The visuals of the film were so 'amateurish' (albeit, intentionally) that the BF was almost physically ill from motion sickness by the end of the film. It didn't affect me that badly, but it was annoying. As for the characters, the protagonist is mainly a whiny wimp, and the 'cameraman' is so annoyingly stupid and obtuse that I cheered when he was killed. The two main female leads were kinda blah, altho the secondary one got more amusing before her, admittedly intriguing, demise.

There wasn't much of a plot. It's sort of an Odyssey to rescue another minor character, but it struck me as a human pinball game with great sound effects. There was suspense in that you don't know what's going to happen to the characters, but by the end, you don't really care much what happens to them. There's no, none, zip, nada, niente explanation of what the monster thing is, where it came from, why it's eating Manhattan, and what happens in the future. We are lead to assume that everything turns out alright for the world, since the 'videotape' is marked with government/DoD labels, etc, so someone survived to find it, but that's it for resolution.

Even the cinema staff was unimpressed (I guess they don't have profit sharing :) ) because we heard a couple of disparaging comments in the period they were in cleaning the theater before the screening. All in all, I wouldn't recommend it, unless you just want a visual experience. Very disappointed.

for more erudite dismembering of the flick, read the NYTimes review.