*spoilers ahead*

Cloverfield, or Godzilla 08, Was a good movie. I think. Infact im still not quite sure how to react to it. On one hand it was exciting, original, directed beautifully, acted well and displayed in a unique and interesting style. On the other hand it ended as frustratingly vague as Halo 2 and if you suffer from any sort of motion sickness whatsoever then the camcorder work in this film will violently rape your uneasy stomach until your bloody screams tear your corporeal form asunder and your soul will forever writhe in the suffering of eternal damnation. In lamens terms, this shit is shakier than an 8 year old with Parkinson’s who just downed four espressos and a red bull. Basically, this movie is not for the weak of stomach.

I personally thought a number of the main characters were annoying, but the sheer invincibility of the creature and the exceptional veracity of its brood are enough to make you pity the entire population of New York. Except for that prick Giuliani of course. The characters in this movie are basically a number of 20-somethings that risk unspeakable evils to save one of their own during the attack on the city after an explosion caused by the creature ruins their going away party mid-fail. I personally found the party scene at the beginning of the movie to drag on a bit but it was necessary to introduce our protagonists and give a little back story into why our main group of characters makes the dumbshit decision to risk life and limb for one of their friends impaled on some concrete and rebar in their half-collapsed apartment building halfway across the city. Hold on, before I get any further into this character rundown I might as well give a brief summary of the plot: Basically the movie is shown through the perspective of a few young folks with a hand-camera that seems to made out of adamantium, only its even stronger than that, its like super-adamantium. Seriously, Wolverine would be lining up to get his skeleton laced with this shit because it’s obviously stronger than what he’s got. This camera gets shaken, tossed, crushed, dropped, smashed and undergoes all kinds of other horrible warranty voiding activities yet still records crystal clear audio and video and survives only to be plucked out of the rubble of a fallen bridge and watched by the US military, we can only assume, for shits and giggles. But alas it is infact a movie and I will not bother discussing the likely hood of a tungsten-reinforced, diamond lensed, invincible camcorder coming into the possession of our heroes.

So the movie starts up at a party with some young people and one of them named “Rob” is leaving to go to Japan, presumably for the porn and video games. Soon enough the party turns sour and is interrupted by balls of fire raining down onto the city and, we can only assume, this has something to do with the monster. Oh yes I shall also mention that Rob has a brother who was the one supposed to be filming testimonials at the party but ends up giving the job to “hud” our comic relief and camera man for the remainder of the movie. Any who, so shit goes down and everyone books ass out of the apartment building only to be almost crushed by the decapitated head of the statue of liberty whilst it sails through the air and into the pavement a mere five feet from every major character thus far. This is about where the army comes in to evacuate the civilians, an evacuation, I might add, that happened oh so much faster than the one in New Orleans (oh well, the American military was due for some competence any day now). Basically everyone tries evacuating on a large bridge, which shortly gets fucked up and we lose one of the main characters named “Jason”, the tool who was originally supposed to be doing the filming. After some running and screaming we are left with 4 protagonists and soon after wards they decide to go rescue the Rob’s true love, or some bullshit like that. She lives very far away so they decide to walk down the subway tracks to her apartment, along the way they encounter death and homeless person jokes. After a run in with some monster-spawn-children things in the subway they all reach a military field hospital, one of the women survivors dies there from her wounds. The three remaining heroes all head for the apartment, camera in tow, and run into the monster a few more times. Here we get to see some military types get owned, stomped on and other great things. The girl trapped in the apartment’s name is Beth and the last message she sent to her group of friends was one about how severely she was bleeding and how she couldn’t move; without questioning the likelihood of her even being alive still, the gang proceeds to enter her collapsed apartment building to rescue her. They find her impaled and pinned against the floor of her room, and she lives… somehow. After another close call with the monster, the group ends up at some last minute evacuation helicopters. One woman gets on the first helicopter, then “hud”, Rob and Beth get onto the second. Hud the cameraman watches in glee as a stealth bomber takes a carpet bomb dump all upside the monster’s head and it falls to the ground. Soon afterwards it reaches up out of the dust and bitch slaps their helicopter out of the sky like a disobedient child. Everyone falls to the ground and somehow doesn’t die, nor does the camera break; without questioning this turn of good fortune they all scurry to their feet and run like hell across central park. Or they would have, if the monster hadn’t shown up right then. It comes up behind Hud and towers directly over him; Hud turns around and stares right up at the monster which then notices him and proceeds to stare at him, giving us a good look at its ugly mug for a few minutes. Apparently paralysed with fear, our cameraman stands there checking out the creature’s dental work for a while before it reaches down and bites him in half, the camera falls a couple stories back to the ground but miraculously still works… go figure. The remaining guy and girl pick up the camera and high tail it to a nearby bridge where they sit and talk to the camera for a bit; we hear some air raid sirens and then explosions, then the camera is partially covered in rubble and we hear the two doomed souls profess their love for one another right before presumably being crushed to death by big chunks of bridge. The footage cuts back to some footage of the same two people about a month ago on Coney Island on a Ferris wheel, they talk for a while then the movie ends. Amazingly this camera survives being buried by a bridge only to also shrug off a nuclear bomb that levels Manhattan in a last ditch effort by the army to kill the thing. As my friend put it, “I’d be pissed if my camera survived a nuke and I didn’t”. I hope you enjoyed my slip-shod plot summary.

*SPOILERS*
Everyone dies
*END SPOILERS*

The acting in this movie is competent; I think it did exactly what it was supposed to do without breaking any new ground. I believe every actor did a good job of dieing and acting like they were fucking terrified. The major characters were all unremarkable save for the cameraman, my personal favourite character. “Hud” Hudson, the cameraman was the only comedy the movie had to offer and he was indeed very funny. Even when it came time to be serious he acted his part well, just as well as any of the other actors. In the end I actually felt sorry for him. I recognised this actor as the same person who plays “Marmeduke” in the surprisingly entertaining new sitcom “Carpoolers”. He is a relatively new actor but I believe he knows what he is doing. Overall the performances were spot on and everyone seemed very much like everyday people caught in the middle of a massive shitstorm.

Now I would like to talk about the Monster. Apparently a few days before the release of this movie a concept sketch, shown below, was released on the Internet. A lot of people, including myself knew nothing of the origin of the sketch and therefore believed it was a legitimate mock-up. Knowing how tight lipped the producers had kept about the details of the movie and monster for almost a year of viral advertising, it was hard to believe that what people were seeing was actually what was in the movie. Well let’s just say that what you see in the drawing is certainly nothing like what is in the movie; and this is a bad thing. Im not saying that the monster of Cloverfield isn’t cool, because it certainly is, but I personally believed that the ridiculously large whale looking motherfucker is the superior monster. The monster they used looked just like a combination generic alien enemy from the game “Resistance: Fall of Man” for the Failstation 3 and Rosie O’Donnell doing a backwards crab walk. You never get a good look at the creature considering the movie is shown through the view of a camcorder attached to a person-who-is-scared-shitless-and-constantly-running but it certainly comes across as a tougher-than-shit-epic-death-beast-thing. The special effects are done exceptionally well and the creature looks true to life in every scene, this thing looks like it means serious business and would easily scare the atheism right out of me for a quick prayer to the nearest god for mercy to be exacted on my poor heathen soul.

As if the monster believed that its sheer massiveness and potential for mass death with a single sweep of its gargantuan finned tail wasn’t enough to do the job; the bastard is capable of spawning tiny, man sized creatures to deal with the survivors of its terrible wrath. Now to start, these little creatures are about the size of a Great Dane and they look exactly like ant lions from Half Life only with a lot more mandible and a lot less weakness to crowbars. The creatures also look somewhat like the alien bugs from Starship Troopers if they crouched down a bit. Though if you compare ant lions and the Cloverfield creature spawn you realise that the physical similarities are actually not that important because the evil little buggers in this movie have two more legs and bigger teeth set into a jaw that looks like a staple remover, they will also pounce on you like fucking jaguars if you so much as breathe in the wrong direction. Oh, and the biggest problem with these nasty fuckers is that if they bite you and you don’t die (which is not likely to happen from the looks of it) you will go extremely pale and sickly for a while before you start bleeding profusely from every orifice. Then you explode. That’s right, when these fuckers bite you they make you fucking explode. If you ever thought ant lions were scary, you haven’t seen shit.

The ending of this movie leaves a lot of questions to be answered. What the fuck was that thing? Where did it come from? Why was it there? Did they even kill it? And why cant this director finish what he started? It is true that a good movie will have you thinking about it long after you leave the theatre and the director probably wanted me to fill in the plot holes with the dry wall spackle of imagination. I could come up with plenty of great explanations for a lot of the loose ends in that movie, but it doesn’t matter what I think happened it matters what the fuck YOU wanted to happen JJ Abrams, I mean it was your bloody story in the first place. If I did not enjoy your ending then I would have come out of the theatre going “This should have happened instead of this” but instead you offer me no such closer and I am left tying together loose ends all the way home till I get frustrated and tie myself a plot-string noose. But if you take the movie as a better-than-usual monster movie told only through the eyes of the victims and ignore the fact that you know very little about what is going on outside the camera’s view you will really enjoy this movie. I would have preferred more of an ending but I still believe that this was a really great movie that deserves some praise for trying something new and breathing life into a rather boring genre. This movie is definitely worth seeing. If I had to assign it a score then it would garner a 7/10. I will definitely buy this one on DVD.

As a side note I’ve noticed that the majority of negative reviews for this movie are all bitching about it bringing back 9/11 memories to evoke emotions in the audience, but these people are just as stupid as the people who thought that 300 was a statement about the war in Iraq. The only similarities between the Cloverfield monster attack and the attack of 9/11 is the fact that it took place in New York and a lot of people died… that’s it… What? Do you think you are the only one who remembers? Im sure plenty of people remember 9/11 (since Bush and Giuliani keep bringing it up) but you seem to be the only people trying to find similar catastrophes in every movie with a collapsed building or two. What a disgusting attempt at trying to sound like you care.