Review of Cloverfield

Cloverfield is an exhausting film, both physically and mentally. Movies should be enjoyable, or at least thought-provoking, but with an unoriginal storyline and literally nauseating camera work, Cloverfield requires a huge effort to watch and offers no payoff.

A group of twenty-somethings are having a party in Manhattan when the island is racked by what seems to be a series of earthquakes. Venturing onto the street, the protagonists soon witness the entire city being torn apart by a giant monster, which one of the characters speculates may have emerged from a crevasse in the ocean. While the area is evacuated by the military, Rob, the probable main character, and a few of his friends stay behind to rescue Rob’s true love from her apartment. A novelty of the narrative is the fact that the entire movie is allegedly filmed on a camcorder by the protagonists. So basically it’s War of the Worlds in a Blair Witch Project package.

The unsteady, whirling movements of the handheld camera don’t do much to create intensity; they only end up making the audience feel queasy. The plot also isn’t too satisfying. Though the introduction to the film reveals that human life has survived on Earth and at some point returned to Manhattan, it is never explained how or if the monster was defeated and what it was to begin with. The film might have been more satisfying, and certainly more believable had the monster been replaced by a particularly ruinous meteor shower.

Cloverfield is mostly a potential cause of sickness and a rehashing of several other films presented as something new. But scenes of New York being destroyed are starting to get tiring and first person camera ploys were tiring even in 1999.