Blatantly Random

Midweek Movie - Cloverfield

Filed under: Midweek Movie — Malcolm Owen @ 11:35 pm

I will readily admit that I have a liking for Lost and other epically strange programmes that stray from the norm. I will also admit to liking weird concept films (I’m still excited over the entire idea of Series 7: the Contenders, the film that’s a TV series that’s too hot for TV, where the contestants have to kill each other). I am also a sucker for watching films in almost completely empty cinemas.
The stars aligned when, last night, a group of friends said they were going to see the latest hypefest, Cloverfield.

I just had to go and see it…

Cloverfield is the name of a case file that the US Government had created, in an attempt to understand what happened in New York. The film is apparently a copy of one of the tapes within that file, found in the area near where a large monster caused trouble. The entire film goes from this viewpoint of an innocent bystander being near all of this action and risking their life to escape. It’s all from one tape, recording over most of one of the main character’s dates in the past, and therefore everything you see is from this cameraman/victim perspective. And the camera does get treated how it would be in a situation such as this. The camera gets used to view just-shot footage of what happened, there’s quick cuts where the camera is turned off to save battery or to avoid recording something too hurtful, but all of it seems real. Heck, the camera gets dropped, covered with dirt and suffers problems that a damaged camera would.

And that’s really as far as I want to go when describing the film. It’s something that you really should watch to understand how great it is. Granted, the story is incomplete compared to the usual terror romps that we are used to, but that does add to the effect of being like one of these people, that they know as little of what is going on as you do. There isn’t as much closure as I would want there to be.

I would highly recommend going to see this, except if you suffer from motion sickness (camera work, but it’s to be expected), in which case I would wait for the DVD (which, as we will probably expect, will contain lots of clues about what is going on). Aside from that, it is a good way to spend a few hours. It fits and to me at least beats the hype. It is a great film.

I want Cloverfield 2 now. Please?