Cloverfield
I feel somewhat guilty today because at the weekend I suggested that my boyfriend and I went to watch the film “Cloverfield” at the cinema. It was quite honestly one of the worst films I have ever seen in my life, and whilst I can’t undo the damage I may have done to my boyfriend by making him sit through it, I can at least try to warn others against making the same mistake. To this end, my Facebook status is currently set to read “Clare does not advise anyone to waste money going to see Cloverfield. Crap film 
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On paper, it sounds like it ought to be a success. I’m quite partial to disaster movies and a lack of intellectual dialogue doesn’t necessarily disturb me, so the idea of a film in which New York is decimated by a monster seemed quite appealing. I confess to being slightly apprehensive about the fact that it was a 15 and had a rider saying “moderate bloody violence” because I don’t cope very well with really scary stuff, but apart from that it seemed like the best that was on offer out of a fairly poor selection of films at the Leicester Odeon.
I guess this is a lesson to me in not researching films adequately before I go to see them. I don’t generally like to read reviews as I feel they can inadvertently spoil the storyline or precondition you to expect something which may or may not be what you actually experience. Had I read up on Cloverfield, however, I would quickly have learned that the entire film had been shot as if on a handheld camcorder in a strange rip-off of the Blair Witch Project. For the first five minutes of the film this had novelty value, however it quickly wore off and became, quite frankly, irritating. The camera angles were naturally often appalling so that especially to start with it was a nightmare trying to establish who was who, sometimes even who was speaking. The limited dialogue that there was was often difficult to distinguish beneath the overall background noise, and the constant shaking and jolting of the picture could easily have made a weak-stomached person feel unwell. In fact I later read on the internet that some cinemas (AMC, I think) have had to resort to putting health warnings on the doors because some customers have complained of nausea 
About two minutes into the film I realised that coming to see it had probably been a mistake. The story starts with a group of friends who are throwing a party for one of their number who is about to start a new life in Japan. The video camera is initially there to enable them to record goodbye messages for him, and is left running when events subsequently take a much darker turn. The plot revolves around the love interest of the guy who is leaving; a rather pretty girl who he appears to have recently slept with but who has turned up at his party with someone else because he has been ignoring her and is, after all, on the verge of emigrating. She leaves the party early, and thus is separated from him at the point at which the monster-induced chaos commences. The rest of the film documents his attempts to locate and rescue her with his friends.
A lot of the action which ensues is highly predictable and not very believable. When the entire cast start running across the Brooklyn Bridge it is pretty obvious that it is going to collapse. My boyfriend informs me it was also pretty obvious that one character was going to explode when she sustained a monster-bite, but I’ve not watched enough horror films to be expecting that one. When the guy finally locates the girl, it turns out she has a metal rod through her chest. Amazingly, someone pulls this out and she fails to bleed to death, then ten minutes later is apparently well enough to manage a brisk sprint. At least three members of the cast are subsequently involved in a helicopter crash, which in a happy twist of fate doesn’t kill or even injure any of them. How, erm, realistic!
Shots of the monster incidentally are few and far between so the scare factor is relatively low. There is no explanation as to where the monster has come from or even whether it is killed at the end, which according to certain sources on the web is leaving the way open for a sequel. Can’t wait :ninja: It doesn’t actually have a Hollywood happy ending, but because the empathy I had built up with the characters amounted to precisely nil, any tragedy left me kind of cold.
Bizarrely, a lot of the reviews I’ve seen on the web seem to suggest this is a film generally regarded as excellent. Perhaps my taste in films is slightly skewed, or perhaps my opinion is biased by the fact that I saw I Am Legend, another disaster flick based in New York, only a few weeks before and found that infinitely superior. Whatever the case, you watch it at your own peril 
Tags: appallingly bad films, Cloverfield