Movie Review: Cloverfield

When Transformers came out, there was a sneak preview of a new J.J. Abrams production called Cloverfield. It basically was a Godzila type movie, and while everyone was ranting and raving over it, I thought that it would have been decent but it really came off as a Blairwitch type movie.

In fact, the entire movie is a "documentary" style film where there's no music, but it's based off of a tape in a video camera about what people had witnessed after the destruction of Manhattan. The entire film was done in this fashion and the first twenty minutes or so was sort of a yawn. I had figured that if the rest of the film was like this, that this was going to be entirely lame just as Blairwitch was when it came out.

But twenty minutes later, I was at the edge of my seat. Once the action starts going, it doesn't stop until the very end. What's also interesting is that being that the film was done in the whole "shaky first person handycam" perspective, it actually caused nausea and vertigo for some.

All in all, this was a superb film. Definitely would watch it again if given the chance, especially on a big screen. It's one of those monster films that didn't go cheesy due to the way it was presented. And sometimes, that's just splendid to see a movie created outside of the usual Hollywood magic mumbo jumbo.