In Manhattan, a small group of friends are throwing a farewell party in honour of Rob (Michael Stahl-David). His best friend Hud (T.J Miller) is going around the party collecting farewell messages using Rob's handheld video recorder. When an earthquake shocks the city and all hell breaks loose, Hud keeps hold of the camera and documents the progress of a small group of his friends as they attempt to escape the havoc.
I'm not sure how to describe my experience of this film. In some ways I thought it was brilliant, in other ways I was slightly disappointed. However, when I think of some of the things that disappointed me, I wonder if it would have been better had it been done differently, and I am uncertain.
I'll start with the characters. Quite quickly, I got an idea of what all the characters were like, and enough of their backstory to give them the shade of realism required. And so, I found that I cared about what happened to them. As the film progressed, those attachments were used well in the plot to shock and scare, and worry and interest. It kept me watching. It was well acted and throughout I had a good impression of the character's fear and their real-world heroism as they suffered their ordeal.
What plot was there was designed to keep the characters in the city for long enough to show off all that was happening. There were some visually interesting moments and some (slightly) scary ones. As none of the characters that the film was following really knew what was going on in the larger picture, the viewer didn't really know what was going on either. There were bits of subplot revealed through snatches of the tape that was being overwritten. As the characters make their way through the city, there are some excellent monster-shots and some spectacular displays of destruction and death. What can be described as the main plot thread, following friends going to rescue another friend who is trapped, was a little bit weak, and a little too cheesy, but it was covered well enough by good acting and some superb action sequences.
Telling the story through a camcorder was an interesting choice. In some ways, it turned what could have been a fairly run-of-the-mill monster flick into a good film. It kept you with the action, at ground level with a small group of people you could relate to. As they ran and screamed and attempted to work out what was going on, the camcorder shooting made it a little bit more realistic. The snatches of monster-footage were very interesting, and didn't give enough information to form a cohesive picture of the alien/monster to start picking too many holes in it.
In other ways, I didn't like the camcorder approach. There were moments where I wanted to tell the cameraman to put the camera down and act like a sensible human being. The camera was nearly always at head-height, even when its holder was running, screaming, fighting, climbing and falling. It felt more like a story being told from first-person perspective than a film told through a camcorder. Where most people would have dropped the camera to protect themselves, even temporarily, the camera always showed enough of the action. And no one seemed to mind the camera; they didn't mind bearing their souls in front of it, or the fact that Hud had at least one hand always glued to it.
On balance, I think Cloverfield was a good film. I did enjoy it, but I won't be adding it to my top-ten any time soon. There was a great monster-movie hidden somewhere within an interesting method of story-telling and while I enjoyed it, I was slightly dissatisfied with many of the choices taken through the film. I found the plot on the cheesy-side, and the ending frustrating, but I enjoyed the concept and feel of the movie. If you get a chance, I think it's worth seeing once.
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