After all the months, and all the blogs, and all the rumors, there was virtually no chance that this was going to be a great movie. But it was still a pretty good movie. It was a monster movie. Easily the best part of the showing was the preview for Star Trek with the Starship Enterprise Under Construction.
The gimmick in Cloverfield-what if we told the story of the people being stepped on by Godzilla instead of the army trying to kill it? The monster was really irrelevant, it was a side note. The Monster is just one more random CGI thing, no more or less scary than The Things in Stephen King’s The Mist.
In fact, Cloverfiled has a lot in common with The Mist. It’s the story of a group of ‘normal’ people who are caught up in something extraordinary. As with all movies of this type, we start off with a group of people and watch as that group gets smaller and smaller. Then there is the shocking ending, which is not even remotely shocking if you happen to have seen any of the recent trailers or watched the beginning of the film.
The CGI monsters look like a cross between The Things in The Mist and The Bugs in Starship Troopers. There is a going away party, and then New York is under attack. We don’t even have the sort of explanation of trans-dimensional experiments we got in The Mist. There is just this monster and it’s countless horde of tiny monsters. Even when we are finally give a full frame closeup of the Monster, it looks like nothing but a big CGI cartoon whipped together from spare parts sitting around the hard drive.
There were funny bits here and there. The constant jiggling of the camera was not as annoying as it was in Blair Witch. As with AVP-R you knew better than to get too attached to any of the characters. The viral marketing campaign had a lot more story than the movie. But then, so did the Sci Fi Channel documentary about The Blair Witch. That was a lot better than the actual movie.
Cloverfield was all questions and no answers. Since the movie opens with a shot of video tape that says something to effect of US Property-Do Not Duplicate, we can assume that life, or at least the US Government, goes on. Is New York home to mad monsters? Is the rest of the country under attack? Can we expect a sequel with Will Smith hunting deer and the occasional giant spiders?
Well, it was just a monster movie. None of the websites seem to have anything to do with the film, with the exception of a Slusho T-Shirt, all the silliness of the viral campaign appears to be meaningless. It was still fun looking at the sites. Jamie and Teddy is still up for the time being, with Jamie going off the deep end- password is jllovesth. 1-18-08 has a few new photos since last time I looked, but again they are kind of random weirdness. Slusho is still up, but the two off-shoot sites are gone.
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