I don't like Cloverfield. I saw it on opening day, and I disliked it so much that I went home and immediately blogged about how much I hated it. Despite the fact that my blog is primarily about my jewelry business, this post shows up on the first page of Google search results for "Cloverfield Sucks." For a week or so, I was actually the #1 return on that search. As such, I've collected a lot of comments from people who hated the movie as much as I did, and a few from people who thought it was great. The movie is polarizing - people either love it or hate it. No one seems to be in-between. I'm going to just gloss over the whole hand-held camera thing, and get right to my complaints with the story. I've heard that JJ Abrams' inspiration was to make an American counterpart to the Asian monster/kaiju movies. Unfortunately, he missed the point. One of the appeals of monster movies is that they're about the monster, and the human characters are usually involved in trying to stop the monster. Cloverfield makes the mistake of focusing on the human characters instead of the monster. Now, don't get me wrong. I enjoy a good character-driven story. "Good" is the key word here, though. For a character-driven story to work, you have to like, care about, or identify the characters. We're introduced to our cast via a party sequence which takes up a large chunk of the movie's already brief running time. Have you ever been sitting in a restaurant, and you're next to a group of people, say in their mid 20s to early 30s, and you're just amazed at how boring and shallow their lives seem to be? If so, you're already familiar with the cast of Cloverfield. This seems like a stupid move to me. Monster flicks attract geeks. If you're going to have a character-driven monster movie, you should make characters that are going to appeal to your audience. One could argue that the character behind the camera had some geek-like tendencies, but they weren't enough. So, we're treated to watching these characters that we don't care about make a trek through a besieged Manhattan, trying to rescue another character that we don't care about. We're given glimpses of the main monster, and also the little monsters that it seems to be dropping all over the place. I'll give the movie props there: the small, spidery monsters were pretty nasty looking, and the main scene where the cast encounters them was well done. If more of the film had shown that kind of intensity, it would have been enjoyable. Instead, the movie ended up being relentlessly grim and pointless. We're given no answers, no hint as to where the monster came from or why it's destroying Manhattan, and up until the end, we don't even get to SEE much of the monster that had inspired so much internet speculation. At the end, I stayed to watch the credits, hoping for some post-credits teaser for a sequel, in which we would be treated to answers and monster-fighting ack-shun. No such luck. There are some things that I think we should just let other cultures do, because they do it better than we do. If Cloverfield is the best monster film that America has to offer, then let's let Japan (and maybe Korea) dominate that field.

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Copyright © 2008 By AJ Reardon E-mail AJ at: ErtheFae@aol.com Visit AJ at: www.erthefae.com