Took the daughter to see Cloverfield today. She’s been bugging us to watch it since she first stumbled across the trailer online several months ago (and truthfully I was intrigued as well. Not just because of the film but for another reason as well. More on that in a bit) so I drug myself out of bed this morning and took her to a matinée showing.
How should I describe this film? It’s like every monster movie ever made, all squashed together, and filmed with a handheld camera while running full tilt down a subway tunnel. It started to make me queasy at the beginning, but luckily I was able to shake it off and continue watching. The action on screen jiggles that much, yes.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not a bad film, it’s just not a great one. It’s a monster movie, and for what it is, it’s one of the most imaginatively executed that I’ve seen. There is a definite arthouse air to it, even though the effects attest to the high dollar funding that backed the film. If monster movies are your kind of thing, then you need to go see it.
The other reason I was there was to check out the teaser for Star Trek XI. I have to say that J.J. Abrams knows how to sell a film (the marketing for Cloverfield should clue you in on this) even to people who are bound and determined not to jump off the fence; people like I’ve been ever since this film was announced.
I think the budget for the Star Trek trailer was probably almost as large as the budget for Cloverfield itself. There were some pretty handsome shots of a well known ship under construction, with a number of famous historical ‘spacey’ voice overs to give the whole thing gravitas. It even briefly made me want to go see the film. Briefly.
But then common sense took over and reminded me that anything could look good in a minute long trailer, so I got back up on the fence again. Having watched every movie that I could find that was even vaguely SciFi related since I was a small child, I’m going to have a hard time staying up on this fence. But I’m bound and determined to do so. Paramount has gotten too much of my money for bad films over the years…
