Look
past the way the story's told and there's absolutely nothing new here:
even the slightly-too-long and too-lame opening scenes that establish
the cast of monster fodder comes to you direct from producer J.J.
Abrams' almost forgotten first series Felicity... only it was done a
heck of a lot better there.
But for once it almost doesn't
matter that the characters are forgettable cardboard cutouts, poorly
acted by a bunch of no-names you'll probably never see again, because
that one central gimmick. Showing the monster attack entirely from a
hand-held camera point-of-view is so good and so well done that the
rest of the film works solely on the level of an amusement park ride.
Whether
using all the elements of the 9/11 attacks to this end is an okay idea
is up to you; clearly the film-makers figure we're ready for it
considering that this might as well have been called 10/11: Terrorist
Monster Attack! But there are plenty of edge-of-the-seat scenes here
where putting monster movie cliches (don't turn on the light!) through
the filter of a hand-held camera gives them new and scary life.
Parts
of this film don't make sense and parts are just plain dumb; when
you're caught up in this film's constant rush of fear (and it's almost
impossible not to get caught up), none of that matters.
EXTRAS with Sean Lynch
With a film like Cloverfield,
which based it's entire marketing campaign on how little it was going
to reveal, it's somewhat of a disappointment to see that it's DVD
release leaves just as many unanswered questions. After all - that's
whole point of DVDs!
There are two different releases, a two
disc and a single disc (as always seems to be the case these days),
which either never actually revealing to much of what we all want to
know about... the monster.
Included here is a relatively
revealing commentary with Director Matt Reeves, who chimes in with a
few key tidbits every now and then (the most interesting is the
revelation behind the muffled audio heard at the very end of the
credits). But, let's face it, there is only a select group of DVD
watching folk will actually sit through an entire audio commentary -
and rewatch the film with "Making of" easter eggs spliced throughout.
The 2-Disc Edition contains an Alternate Ending, which again, is somewhat of a letdown. But fun to watch none the less.
Perhaps they are waiting to reveal all the secrets in the inevitable Cloverfield 2.
Conclusion:
Movie 80% Extras: 65%
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