January 19, 2008

Cloverfield

I just got back from watching Cloverfield, which I greatly enjoyed.

For those of you who haven't been following the viral web campaign, it's a modern day monster movie shot entirely with a hand-held camera. The premise is that a 20-something yuppie is going off to Japan for his job, so his friends are throwing him a going-away party. His best friend "Hud" is documenting the whole thing, so he can watch it while in Japan.

Then all hell breaks lose.

This isn't a Godzilla movie. This isn't the Blair Witch Project. It's also not an H.P. Lovecraft movie. This film somehow combines the best of all three and very well.

While at first I didn't care about the characters at all - after all, they are spoiled 20-somethings - when they have to deal with this disaster, loss of loved ones, survive and deal with each other, they did sort of grow on me. By the end, they seem more like real people.

The monster is like something out of Lovecraft, or perhaps the first Hellboy. It's not like anything we've seen before, and is scary in that it's so unnatural or perhaps supernatural.
There are several things about it left unexplained, which just makes it that much more unsettling.

As this reviewer put it, "Godzilla, you got punked."

(there is an audio easter egg at the end of the credits, but apparently you have to listen to it backwards, which this site provides.)

4 Comments:

Blogger jruschme said...

Yes, but to paraphrase a comment on Slashdot... There was a Star Trek teaser attached and you're talking about a monster movie? :-)

8:24 PM  
Blogger Rothar said...

Hey man, haven't heard from you in a while!

Yeah, I forgot all about the Trek trailer. Not much there, but a good teaser.

And to think, I paid $10 to watch that trailer, then stayed for the free movie that followed!

3:26 AM  
Blogger jruschme said...

Supposedly the teaser hits the web officially tomorrow (1/21). I can't wait to see the fanboys deconstruct the glimpse of the Enterprise. (Though I find it hard to believe that the state of the art for joining metal in the 23rd century is still Arc Welding.)

Loved the movie, though. I went by myself (Faith was at a friend's house and this was not Sherri's cup of tea.).

1:12 PM  
Blogger Rothar said...

I've already caught some of the fanboy flack: apparently Enterprise was built in space (this may be from novels though and not official source material), so the production team has already had to respond to their own trailer.

11:10 PM  

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