I went to see Cloverfield on opening night. I now remember why I don’t go to theaters anymore.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Cloverfield is about a monster attacking NYC. It’s shot from the point of view of regular people caught up in the event, filming with their handycam. A group of friends is having a party and filming it for the guest of honor and shit starts going down.
What makes this movie so bad? If you give a camera to someone who’s never filmed anything before, instinctually they point it at a person’s face and hold the camera as still as possible. Also, when a giant alien monster fish-a-saur starts destroying things and crapping freaky spiders, you drop the camera and run.
In the given situation, it becomes every man for themselves. The only responsibility a person has is to help their children. You can sleep well tonight knowing that if we get attacked tonight, I’m not going to come make sure you’re safe and healthy. I’ll be far away.
But back to the movie. The previews made this movie look much better for one main reason. If you’re filming and you start running with the camera, not paying attention to what the camera is pointing at, you’re going to film a lot of fast, streaking, blurry ground. All of those moments were not shown in any previews.
These pointless, terrible shots made up at least a quarter of the movie. How do I know this? Each time something like that happened, I had to look away from the screen to prevent motion sickness. I’m not one to get motion sick easy, but if I had forced myself to watch the whole thing I would have hurled on the handicapped person in front of me.
The bottom line is that this movie is bad. I like the concept, but it didn’t work at all. I’d rather see this movie shot normally. Sean also said that if there’s a second one it’s going to be an alternate perspective of the same attack. Woo Hoo.
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3 Comments
Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
As with any movie, Cloverfield had plenty of things you can point at and dislike, and I didn’t think it was awesome, but I wouldn’t place it much higher or lower than the majority of movies that I’ve seen recently. I also was not involved with all the multimedia stuff you’ve done, so things like the camera work aren’t so glaringly bad to me, I guess. But hey if you didn’t like the movie, no biggie; in my experience you’re awfully good at picking movies but we’re bound to disagree eventually.
That said, I think it’s only fair to say that while, “Why on earth is he still holding onto the camera?” and, “Okay, one more of those shots and I’m gonna need some Dramamine,” are both valid things to say about a movie, I’m not sure you can say both of them about the same movie.
The character with the camera seemed on the lower side of the intelligence scale and was in panic mode most of the movie, so clinging desperately to the camera as a way to psychologically hold on to the part of his life where he wasn’t probably going to die a gruesome death is reasonable, and if he had done so and then nailed amazing shot after amazing shot, people would be kvetching about that instead.
But anyway, I’m sounding like a fanboy, so I’ll stop. Oh, and it would be a terrible idea to make a second one. I’m with you on that.
Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
This movie would have been more believable it it actually was shot totally on a handycam. The problem with that is then it wouldn’t have been watchable cause it would be an hour and a half of blurry.
The other problem I have with the camerawork is zooming. There was at least one point where the camera zoomed in on something, then did a crazy fast pan to something else in the distance. I would like evryone to try this. Use your digital camera if you have to. Zoom in all the way to something on a table. Then quickly pan over (in about a second) to something on another table without zooming out. I can’t do it either. Nobody can without assistive equipment.
The one thing I’ll change about that review is that I think people should see it. I think it’s a great film to know and to study. That doesn’t mean it’s good or that you should like it.
Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Heh, yea that kind of accuracy with a camera is damn near impossible. They were in a bit of a hard spot with that though, caught between “hey that’s not shot with a handycam” and “I’m going to be sick if they go down another flight of stairs.”