After much hype, viral marketing and clever secrecy by mastermind J.J. Abrams, I finally got around to watching “Cloverfield”, aka “Blair Witch Project” meets “The Host” meets “Godzilla” meets footage from 9/11. In Matt Reeves’s underwhelming film, we meet a host of characters during a farewell party for one of their members. Suddenly there’s a boom, the lights flicker, and the head of the Statue of Liberty lands in the street. We are involved in all this and ain all that follow because one of the partygoers had the good sense to keep recording events as they unfold, which means that we get QuesiCam footage of the destruction of Manhattan for almost an hour and a half.
“Cloverfield” opens with a tedious stretch (the party), delivers a few well realised, tense scenes (involving night vision and sudden death) and then ends. Thrown in is an unnecessary romance subplot. Regarding the camerawork, I must admit that, though I’ve never suffered from any motion sickness in any context, “Cloverfield”s shake, roll and twirl kinetics made even me quite nauseated. An interesting, yet ultimately failed catastrophe movie.
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