Cloverfield (2008)
6 02 2008
Four days ago, after our grand evening with The Enemy we decided to not go home at 9:30pm but have a bite to eat at King’s Court and watch a movie. At the flick-o-drome we talked about the different possibilities and found Cloverfield pretty interesting since nobody knew what it was about. Tickets were bought and the fun began. It took me till today to write a review because I wasn’t able to make up my mind. But more about that later.
Cloverfield is a monster flick with a fresh concept. In an equation
Cloverfield = Godzilla + Blair Witch Project + Alien
A monster - let’s call it The Crab From Outer Space aka Space Crab shows up in Manhattan and starts to destroy everything. For more action it drops little Spider Crabs that attack and destroy, too. The civilians try to escape and the army tries to fight and kill the monster. In the middle of everything and not off Manhattan is a small group of civilians who have some - let’s call it unfinished business. They run around with a video camera. Yes, you’re guessing right. The “uncut footage” of this cam is the movie called Cloverfield.
I loved this concept. The shaky camera was ok with me (one of my buddies felt sick), the effects were great and the pictures were daunting. Just the story was really bad and destroyed Cloverfield’s potential to become one of the best movies ever and get a 10 out of 10 in my review.
So the maker of Cloverfield, J.J. Abrams, who you should know for creating Lost, had this cool concept and needed a story to make a movie out of it. Instead of hiring a good writer for cinematic productions he let one of his Lost writers do the job and somehow along this way created this mess.
During my internal progress of deciding whether I liked Cloverfield or not I surfed the net a lot. I found out that the name “Cloverfield” has nothing to do with the flick but is the name of the highway exit Abrams takes when driving to his Santa Monica office. I remembered this little parody on the writers of Lost and posted it to my tumblr site. I checked rottentomatoes for reviews tearing Cloverfield apart but found a 76% rating. I also wrote the outline for Cloverfield II. None of all that really helped me making up my mind.
To sum this up basically Cloverfield would be a 10/10 if there wasn’t this bad story. It kind of destroyed the whole picture. After letting all these impressions sink in I realized that I’m not able to give a really bad rating either; the concept is just too cool. That’s why I decided to give a 6 out of 10. So go out and watch this flick and try to get overwhelmed by pictures and action and not by the story.
Comments : No Comments »
Categories : Movies & TV Shows









