Shouting Grounds

So Redscape and I finally made it out to the theater to see a new movie…too bad we picked Cloverfield. Warning to all of our religious fans out there, this review is going be be spoiler packed and, just cuz I know so many of you out there are reading this, I promise I won’t pull any punches.

I thought the premise would be good, from what I’ve read and seen of the movie. A twist on the classic ‘huge monster attacks New York’ movie, the whole thing being shot from a handycam by normal people experiencing the event from the ground. Now, as long as the movie is decent, I love a good creature-disaster movie. The last two that come to mind, King Kong (listen to the podcast!) and Godzilla (with Matthew “used it all up on Ferris Bueller” Broderick), failed miserably…so it’s been awhile coming. I also liked that JJ Abrams hadn’t revealed the monster in any of the trailers yet.

Onto the movie. First issue, movie starts out with date and time stamp on the video, which switches back and forth a few times…not a great idea since soon after, the time stamp goes away completely. I’d rather not have the time stamp there the whole time, but stay consistent, man.

So there’s a going away party, people…blah blah blah. The camera gets handed to possibly the most annoying fuckin clown they could have found. Camera shaking is going to be obvious given the environment, but for christ sake, we can’t enjoy the goddamn movie if we can’t see what’s going on or fucking watch it without fucking puking from fucking motion sickness. Throw in the fact that the asshole is screaming “ROB! ROB! ROB!” the whole time like a goddamn half wit looking for his nanny, and I wanna rip my own throat out after thirty minutes.

About 45 minutes in, I think you get your first glimpse of the monster, mostly arms, tails and ass in views caught by news choppers covering the nonsense. The army shows up conveniently fast in full force complete with Abrams tanks and mobile Howitzers. I don’t know how far from Manhattan the Army keeps a fully stocked depot, but I don’t think they could mobilize what they did in so little time. Anyway, it gets to the point where all you want is the silly-old classic monster movie where you see plenty of Monster vs. Army action.

About the same time you accept that since this is a movie the Army could indeed show up faster than Domino’s Pizza, you start to then wonder why it seems like the monster is following our protagonists around the city. The monster drives them down into the subway, the baby monsters are on their heels underground, when they come out of the subway to find girlfriend’s building the monster clambers down the street at them, they escape to a helicopter which the monster leaps at and crashes into Central Park, and then the damned monster finds them there and finally, most satisfyingly eats shitty-camera-douche…but then ignores the other two!?? There’s how many million people in Manhattan, and this creepy bastard chooses these simple shits to chase around? Goddamnit…too fuckin easy.

While I thought I would enjoy seeing the event from the citizen’s eyes, in the end all I wanted to see was the monster breaking shit and the army blazing in and dropping everything we’ve got on the fucker. It’s sad, but after sitting through this I just wanted to see the goddamn monster…not listen to some shitheel scream at “Rob!” the whole time. To quote the Gene over there, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!“

And one more thing, I know we just got glimpses of things, etc…but I couldn’t help but feel like I’d seen certain things from this movie before…
Go see it, to be sure…but take a barf bag with, and leave any sharp objects that you might try to kill yourself with at home.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Hate, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.