When Cloverfield came out, it was huge, and no I don't just mean the monster, but I mean everyone was talking about this movie, everyone went to go see it and yet...I have no idea what people think about it. Do people love it? Hate it? Indifferent? I don't know...I mean I know how I feel about it, personally I love this film. The first 20 minutes of the film are spent establishing the characters that we are going to spend the rest of the movie with and I genuinely grew to care about them, they feel almost like characters in a sitcom and you know what, I would watch that sitcom. But they're also well written enough to feel like genuine people, they're not perfect people with their lives all sorted and they're not dispicable or obnoxious (Except for Jason, but he's supposed to be). I felt like I could identify myself with these people, sadly I quickly realised I was Hud, which is kinda depressing. So when the disaster strikes, I was invested in seeing these people get out, and it was sad whenever someone died. And while most found footage movies suffer from suspension of disbelief been broken, mostly because at some point you feel like yelling "Put the camera down and run!" it's more acceptable here because the camera man Hud (Get it?) is kind of dumb. Also rewatching it makes me realise just how many single takes are done in this movie, it's quite impressively handled. And yes I like the way how the monster was handled, we barely see it but we never forget that it is this present threat in the film, and the focus remains on our main characters rather than glorifying the creature. The film definitely has vibes of 9/11, big disaster in New York, monument destroyed and a whole lot of it is captured on video camera and we see the survivors of the event and the trauma they go through. Also this movie has one hell of a crew, Matt Reeves directing, JJ Abrams producing and Drew Goddard writing, these people are insanely good at what they do and this is no different. Now am I saying this is a masterpiece of it's genre? No. Well actually considering it's competition in the found footage genre it actually might be. The film can be cliched at times, the spider thing was stupid and certain elements are so unrealistic that it doesn't balance well, like how good is the quality of that camera? Seriously that thing has perfect sound and video, it's a bit distracting. But I can't think of any problems that seriously bring the film down for me. Also it is worth noting that some people might complain about the run time of this movie and that being that it is really short, like i'm talking barely making it past 70 minutes, but to be fair I don't think it needed to be any longer, it had a story to tell and it told it at a decent pace, I think it works well for the film. And also the marketing of film was genius, the trailer was nothing more than the clip of the statue of liberty's head getting thrown across the city, that was it, not even a title, the mystery behind it got a lot of people talking, so when they finally learnt what it was, they absolutley had to see it, just look at that poster, it looks incredible.
I kinda love this movie and feel like it sometimes gets overlooked, I love the acting, I love the writing, I love the directing, I love the marketing and I love the pacing. Yes some visuals don't do it for me and I do have my nitpicks, but I still thoroughly enjoy it. 9/10.
-Danny
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