Current mood:

impressed

Cloverfield
It's been a while since everyone has seemed to have an opinion on a movie before it's released, but thanks to one of the best teasers ever, Cloverfield has piqued the interest of most teen-to-twenty-somethings. Predictably such hype will inevitably be met with a backlash, as people flock to the theater to have their questions from the trailer answered and in doing so totally misunderstand the film (or perhaps play directly into the filmmakers' hands?). No, you're not going to learn anything new about the monster, nor are the filmmakers going to tell you whether the ending is happy or sad. What you get is much more terrifying - there is no objective vantage point from which to make sense of the madness and no resolution to leave you settled when the movie ends. Like my favorite movie of last year ("Children of Men"), Cloverfield puts the audience in the middle of the action, and the perspective never leaves that of the "hand held" camera operated by the aptly named Hud (an acronym for "heads up display"). This cultivates the radical subjective perspective that is the defining feature of the movie and is what ultimately sets it apart from (read: makes it better than) monster films that have come before it.

I liked it, and I liked it because it did exactly what I thought it should do - follow through with what it set out in that awesome teaser that had me hooked from day one.