Well, for once, a movie managed to live up to the insane amount of hype that preceded it. Cloverfield is a smashing monster movie. It truly is Blair Witch-meets-Godzilla, with a small group of people trying to survive a monster rampaging through New York City while recording their plight on a digital video camera. As with most of these kind of films, the opening 15-20 minutes of character development (such as it is, which isn't much) are almost interminable as you wait for the action to start. But once it does, it never lets up. Not for a minute.
The effects are brilliant, and even more effective for the way they're presented. By only allowing glimpses of the monster, explosions and other assorted horrors as the camera flies around, your mind fills in the blanks, and that's always more effective than anything a CGI artist can come up with.
The only complaint I have is that the actors playing the underdeveloped characters are a mixed bag. Some of them struggle at times to make their dialogue sound "real" and improvised. And it doesn't help that the script can get pretty clunky.
But that doesn't really matter when the real meat of the film is the action setpieces and the monster's rampage. And that meat is tasty. Some of the people in our theater complained as the credits rolled, but if you want detailed plot exposition and a pat Hollywood ending, you went to see the wrong movie. I like 'em better this way anyway.
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