Assume that everything beyond this point is a spoiler.
It’s tough talking about Cloverfield without resorting to spoiler warnings, if only because there isn’t a whole lot left to the movie when you move beyond that. Comparisons to The Blair Witch Project are all but inevitable, given their shared shaky-cam style and “found footage” plot device. And, to a point, that comparison holds; both films serve, as Roger Ebert wrote in his original review of Blair Witch, as “a reminder that what really scares us is the stuff we can’t see. The noise in the dark is almost always scarier than what makes the noise in the dark.”
Except then Cloverfield up and shows us what’s making that noise, and in fairly large detail. Which I guess is where the comparisons to Godzilla come into play. The monster here is more interesting and believable than a man in a big rubber suit…but both have the disadvantage of being much less terrifying on-screen than off.
Actually, if I had to pick any one movie to compare this film to, it would likely be Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. Both are panicked flights from hostile (and ultimately unknowable) alien threats, viewed from the ground-level — again as Roger Ebert writes — “through the eyes of a few foreground characters.” And both are a little exhausting after awhile. I didn’t have a lot of trouble with the shaky camera work myself in Cloverfield, but I also wasn’t too disappointed when the movie ended after about eighty minutes.
In the end, I feel like Cloverfield took a lot of what was good in all three of those movies, but also didn’t skip what was bad about them. And I think that none of those bits and pieces really add up to a memorable new whole. (I own a copy of The Blair Witch Project. I don’t think I’ll be owning a copy of this one.) There are things the movie does well, a few buttons it knows how to push and keeps pushing, but ultimately I thought it was a little bit of a letdown.