Don’t read this if you don’t know anything about this movie. It’s best watched in ignorance.
Sometimes a film that is a great concept doesn’t really work in reality – Sliding Doors, 300, Sin City – visually arresting or philosophically clever but overall they don’t work. But I think Cloverfield does work – its a little bit like the excellent NIKE advert below:
99 % of the movie is shot from the perspective of the first person – you see events unfold through the eyes of one of the partipants – well nearly through their eyes- actually it is through a high def cam corder with an SD card and an incredibly long battery life.
The movie starts innocuously enough as we are introduced to the participants through someone documenting a goodbye party. Its a great idea as you can quickly get to know the relationships and everything can happen in real time. Then something happens…
The fact that it all takes place in New York and there is such a large scale of devastation that includes a massive dust clouds moving between the large buildings. It is a deliberate but strange homage to 9/11 which felt somehow inappropriate in what is basically a fright / horror movie.
Although it is motion sickness inducing to watch the handycam footage is brilliant. It means you experience the film in the first person – it feels like a cross between a computer game like half-life and real life. Like a lot of Jerry Bruckhiemer productions – the concept is good and the tension grows at the beginning but then it ends in an unsatisfactory way. Having no superstars in the movie means that anyone can die at any point in the proceedings which makes it exciting to watch.
Let me reflect on it some more and i’ll write more later…
