Review of Cloverfield

Cloverfield (2008)
7/10
Very Disappointing
21 January 2008
Warning: Spoilers
I'm a huge fan of monster, apocalyptic, and doomsday movies, so naturally I was very excited to see this one. To summarize in one word: Meh.

This movie with such a huge premise was exactly 1 hour and 13 minutes long. WTF? With such a short movie, the writers choose to spend the first 20 minutes on literally nothing of interest. You're taken to a going away party for someone with an irritating personality. A party I would have left after 10 minutes if I was actually there. So, after a quarter of the movie is wasted here, an alarm goes off and everyone starts running. The shaky camera work at the party is annoying, and it just gets worse...and worse...and worse, and my annoyance just kept growing.

So much could have been done with this story, but the writers and director had it out for the audience and gave everyone a big F.U. There was about two minutes collectively where the movie was cool, but that's only if you're into special effects. If you're into extremely shaky film footage where you have to strain to see anything, then you'll love this one. This was ten times shakier than the Blair Witch Project.

I bet this movie was made for less than 100k, and most of that was spent on CGI, because the actors shouldn't have been paid more than 5k apiece. This movie jumped from totally boring to chaos without any explanations. Where did the monster come from? Why, after seeing it blown up, did it show up again unscathed? Where did it go at the end and what the hell happened? Why were buildings being blown up? Could the monster shoot fire balls out of it's ass or something? We never find out.

Apparently, the budget ran out because the movie just ended abruptly. No resolution or answers whatsoever. The characters were so weak that I didn't even care when they died. This may be a candidate for a Raspberry award. Very, very disappointing.
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