I finally saw it. My sponsee loaned it to me. I liked it quite well. Plot wise, it’s basically The American Godzilla. No major shocks or surprises, but well acted, well directed, cleverly shot, tense, and creepy. Also the monster was all kinds of awesome. I’d say it’s definitely worth a rental.
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
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good thing, too, because the other two american godzillas were travesties.
cloverfield wasn’t all that, IMHO, but it wasn’t bad either. i liked the setting, liked the story, liked the acting, the mood, all that. i just thought that the whole self-recorded conceit wore thin about 20 minutes into the movie. they had to constantly motivate why the character would bother even holding on to the camera in the face of all of that destruction and chaos. at a certain point suspension
 of disbelief was just no longer possible.
it didn’t help my opinion any that the very next movie i saw was romero’s diary of the dead, which was a "home video" style movie that actually did it right.
My friend, Diary of the Dead was atrocious. Seriously.
I’d heard they were going to do a sequel from the POV of a media crew, but haven’t heard much since those first rumors. Good movie, IMO.
OK, now I have to defend the American Godzilla. (I didn’t know there were two. I only know the Matthew Broderick version.)
I find the people who hate it most are Godzilla fans. I’m not. But before very far into the film, I decided it’s not a Godzilla film at all. It’s a dragonslaying film set in the modern era. And viewed that way, it pretty much fits the classic dragonslaying mold. I enjoyed it far more than any of the recent "dragons in the modern world" films.
I’m somewhat of a Godzilla fan, inasmuch as I liked the movies as a kid and as an adult liked them even more because they’re so bad they’re funny.
When they made that Godzilla movie with Matthew Broderick, I knew they were going to try a straight non-humorous interpretation, and I thought that would be fun. But the script had so many problems that my suspension of disbelief was ruined. It was like they couldn’t really fully commit to being "realistic" (to whatever extent giant city-eating monsters can be), so they had some contrived situations that the characters got into that no sane person would.
Anyway, Cloverfield is an "American Godzilla" in the sense that it’s a "Giant monster attacks city in an awesome and scary spectacle" sense, and it turns out that that’s what the producer and director had in mind. And they accomplished it; I wouldn’t be surprised, if there are successful sequels, if "Clover" (the nickname of the monster) becomes such a character. We’ll see.
Jesse,
I don’t know, what about it didn’t you like? I thought it was pretty ham-fisted, which is somewhat typical of Romero, but on the other hand given the entire conceit of the movie (totally amateur production) I thought it worked really well. Every poorly delivered or poorly written line only served to heighten the entire artifice the movie was laying bare.
Martin,
the other one is the original Japanese Godzilla which was sliced and diced into something totally unrecognizable when it was released overseas. The two versions are so different they may as well be two different movies. If you liked the American Godzilla more power to you! It’s one of the few movies I seriously considered walking out of (and I have a very high threshold for crap in movies). But, as I think Jesse illustrates, I think I’m in the minority where Diary of the Dead is concerned, so we all have our own peculiar tastes.
The thing that surprised me the most about Cloverfield, when watching the DVD extras, was finding out Clover was a ‘child’ and scared, not some random rampaging monster at all. I’d seen it at the theatres then got the DVD to see all the small bits, like the splash at the end and the alternate endings, etc.
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