John's Movie Musings

Cloverfield has been sitting in my Netflix queue for an eternity and it finally showed up in 1080p goodness this weekend. Was it worth the wait? Not exactly.

As we all know by now, Hollywood has this love affair with reinventing old stories. JJ Abrams (who you know from LOST and Alias, also did Cloverfield) is reinventing Star Trek later this year (yes, with the Kirk and Spock crew). Cloverfield is just a reinvention of Godzilla. Some may disagree with that since it's set in New York and the monster is different, but it's basically the same story...just without the charm.

When the Blair Witch Project came out, people loved its style. Then, when they actually saw it, those same people threw up in the theaters from all the Shaky-Cam nonsense. I'm not sure why JJ Abrams decided to do a Godzilla movie with the Blair Witch Shaky-Cam. At home, it wasn't too bad to watch, but I can think of a few scenes that would have been painful in the theater. Note to Hollywood: I really wish that fad would fade.

So you can go two directions with a disaster movie. You can focus all the attention on the destruction and let some special effects artists earn a raise. Or, you can try to create a story in and around the distaster and hope it's good. Usually, we don't see that route taken by directors because the stories are crap. Always.

Cloverfield stumbles on both paths. A monster attacking New York is great for special effects. In fact, I've seen that city destroyed so many times in movies, I'd bet every inch of it has been digitized. Unfortunately, the monster doesn't get much screen time. This means the action has to center around the poorly crafted love story. The motivations behind dragging these idiots around Midtown are flimsy, at best.

The biggest problem is that nothing is explained and nothing is resolved. It's like you took a book and ripped out the first and last five chapters. You get the gist of the story, but with no supports on the ends, it collapses on itself.