johnlink ranks CLOVERFIELD (2008)
So watching Cloverfield on a television is certainly a different experience from watching it on the big screen. I think that the comedy stuff pops a little more (it was funnier than I remember it being), but certainly the scope of the production quality suffers. Ultimately, I found, the story is compelling enough to make it better in your living room than most of its genre.
In short, a ginormous monster lands in Manhattan. One guy with a camera records the mayhem.
This was my second viewing of CLOVERFIELD (2008). I watched it on 1.22.09, at movie night.
FILM
It does what it does well. The handheld thing is a gimmick, to be sure, but it’s effective in CLOVERFIELD. There are enough tricks to make the perspective stay interesting. The visual effects are superb. And, happily, there is some character development here. Really, JJ Abrams was smart enough to make a monster movie that is more concerned with the characters’ reactions to an event than it is with the event itself. SCORE: 7
MOVIE
Like I said above, the experience is not the same in your living room as it is in the theater with Dolby speakers attempting to dislodge your head. No word of a lie, the bass in this movie fucked up our sound system at the movie theater for months. It actually physically moved some of our speakers. SCORE: 7
ACTING
As funny as he can be, I actually find the kid with the camera, Hud, a little annoying. He is not the most interesting character in the film, and I sometimes wished for someone more in awe. But the acting gets slightly lower points more for the extras and smaller roles than for the leads. My only real problem with the main characters is it looks as though they were all pulled out of a Calvin Klein catalog. SCORE: 6
WRITING
As I’ve mentioned, I appreciate the way that the characters, rather than the events, drive the story. I’m not a huge fan of how it ends, but I understand the need to have it climax the way it does. It’s just that, maybe I’m old fashioned, I like to see some people actually SURVIVE in a survival story. SCORE: 7
FINAL TALLY
FILM: 7; MOVIE: 7; ACTING: 6: WRITING: 7
7+7+6+7+0 = 27
FINAL SCORE: 6.75
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