Movie Review: Cloverfield

Twenty-five minutes into Cloverfield, something special happened... I rolled my eyes, grabbed my remote, and said to myself, "this movie really sucks." But something steadied my hand from making the untimely decision to terminate Cloverfield from my TV screen. Something deep inside me, something from my past, would not let me turn the damn thing off. As I sat through the rest of the movie, it came to me, and then this movie magically transformed from a piece of garbage into a wonderful jewel. Let's see if I can explain this all to you...

Many of us had times in our past with a group of friends where we were young, bored, and one of us had a video camera. These ingredients led to the making of home movies, where there were characters, plot, and ad-libbed lines that were always hilarious even if they didn't mean to be. And then when your done with it, you show to all your friends, and they usually think it's incredibly funny, and then one of those friends is like "Let me edit it for you" and then you have bloopers and such at the end, and then your friends love it even more, and then everyone kind of forgets about it, and it gets mixed in with your other tapes, and then you watch it a couple years later and it's still completely hilarious, if not more so. Now, let's pretend someone gave this bored group of kids millions of dollars, and said "we'll give you everything you need, just make your movie!" That is how I imagine Cloverfield came to be.

With this new perspective on things, Cloverfield went from being a really crappy suspense/horror film to "that hilarious day when they gave us money to make a movie". When you look at it this way, it seems like a great social experiment: Take those homemade movies and make them completely Hollywood, with special effects and everything, and test the audience's reaction. This makes it completely different from "The Blair Witch Project", by the way, in that those kids still didn't have any money, and their movie was actually a little scary. However, my initial response was changed from, "Oh God, this movie sucks butt!" to "Wow, how do they keep a straight face for so long... their movie is so much better than the one me and my friends made!".

It's all about perspective with this one folks, keep an open mind.