Reporting to you live from Grover’s Mill New Jersey.

Cloverfield(2008)

There is something about a movie with a giant monster in it that appeals to the ten year old in all of us. The fascination with dinosaurs never quite seems to leave us no matter how old we get. JJ Abrams, the creator of Lost,loves Godzillamovies, and wanted to make an American giant monster. I suppose he felt he couldn’t use King Kongbecause of Peter Jackson’srecent film, so he created one of his own.

The first trailer for Cloverfield barely showed the audience anything, but we knew a giant monster was in Manhattan. The later trailers were just as secretive, but we knew that the movie would be shown to us in a first person perspective, through the use of a hand held camera. The reviews for Cloverfield mostly read about the audience getting motion sickness, and a lot of people have compared it to “The Blair Witch Project”due to uses of similar camera techniques. Like all giant monster films, Cloverfield has a message under the footsteps of the giant beastie. It’s a simple message that many members of our modern society have failed to grasp. “Put away your camera phone, there are more important things to do.”

This is a Godzillamovie for the self-absorbed camera phone using MySpace generation. The first half hour of the movie is nothing but twenty something drama, and a game of MySpace rumor mill. The only way to kill this sort of behavior is with explosions, a giant monster and the flying head of the Statue of Liberty landing in the middle of the street. But sadly, this sort of behavior can’t be stopped by flying landmarks the panicked crowds simply stop running in terror to take cell phone photos of the decapitated symbol of liberty. So Abrams upped the ante, by using cinematography inspired by news footage from September 11, 2001. Nothing like a building crumbling into dust and flooding the streets with debris to make people forget their camera phones.

The monster isn’t clearly visible until the last quarter of the movie, the camera operator Hudson “Hud” (heads up display, cute joke there) focuses his attention on his three friends who escaped death with him. We the audience are subjected to Hud’s rotten sense of humor as the foursome hunkers down for safety, until Hud’s bud remembers that the girl he treated badly earlier in the picture, that he actually is in love with, is right in the path of the monster. Yes folks, they head right into the waiting tentacles of death to rescue her. We then get to see a quaint tribute to FDNY, some looters, and a street level view of the US armed forces attacking the beast as it rips down buildings.

The monster is CGI, the sets are not, and debris falls with the proper weight and crashing affects. The special affects worked nicely to show us the death rattle of the Big Apple. The storyline, what there is of it, holds true, and the characters have believable reactions to the situations they are placed in. The best part of this movie is that the monster’s origin is not explained. I watched the credits until the end, humanity never finds out why this beast is destroying everything in its path. I left the cinema feeling satisfied that I had seen a giant monster destroy New York City, and with a sense that the Red Sox, Yankees rivalry was ended for all time. Luckily for me, no one in the theatre threw up in his or her popcorn bucket.

The movie had trailers for Iron Man, Hellboy2, and the new Star Trek movie. Which were worth the price of a matinee ticket by themselves.