Cloverfield or: Let's run around the monster with a camera until we die.

I'll start this review off with a positive note: Cloverfield kept me very tense throughout the film. The shaky cam horror genre needs more films desperately for this reason (Romero's Diary of the Dead comes out in the near future). The movie's portrayal of the disaster, Cthuluzilla v. NYC, felt real to me.

Other things like motivation and human psychology did not resemble our world in the slightest. The characters are a bunch of twentysomethings (their names are entirely unimportant) and one of them is leaving for Japan soon. He recently hooked up with a girl he's had a crush on throughout college, and at his going away party she has brought another guy. He's upset, and so far everything that has happened feels real.

Then Cthuluzilla (as much as I'd like to think I'm being creative in calling the monster this, I imagine all Lovecraft geeks in the audience thought the same thing) invades the city. Disaster strikes. Attempts to escape fail and cause the death of friends and family. Logically, those remaining go find the military safe zone to be escorted away, correct?

No. Then the movie would be over after twenty minutes. Who pays $9 dollars for twenty minutes of film and fifteen minutes of military propaganda and Pepsi commercials? Twentysomething Prime decides he must go find the girl he hooked up with once and has a crush on, and his idiot friend who can't stop recording these events decides to tag along with two girls in shock.

Again, I'd like to stress that the scenes that develop from there are quite suspenseful, but I just found myself uninterested in these people and whether or not they lived or died. In a similar film, The Mist, the audience was given characters who had more depth then one would expect in the horror sub-genre that is typically nothing more than an exercise in keeping the audience in a constant state of anxiety.

Overall, I'd say the film isn't worth your money unless you happen to love monster films. It gives us a monster, but it gives us little else.