Thursday, January 24, 2008

Cloverfield Review

I really wanted to see this, but was also hesitant, because I thought it would be another "Blair Witch Project", a movie I hated.



What a pleasant surprise to see that it actually had a story. It has been told many, many times before, namely in multiple "Godzilla" films, but the "live coverage" look made it seem fresh and new.



A problem I have with the shaky camera bit in 2008, however, is that there are more and more stabilizers in cameras these days, that the shakiness is almost moot, yet camera operators keep doing it. A telling scene is one where the crowds are surrounding the head of the Statue of Liberty (mercilessly out of scale I might add), and they are using their cell phones to capture the action and the images in their phones are quite stable and everyone's trying to get a good shot.



Finally, at 85 minutes, it's just a tad too long to make this feature film worthy. It would have made for a marvelous half-hour episode of the original "Twilight Zone".



Overall, it is worth seeing just to see a very noble experiment, but be prepared to get a little queasy with all of the camera movement.

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