{"id":2877,"date":"2008-01-20T17:01:29","date_gmt":"2008-01-20T22:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=2877"},"modified":"2008-01-20T17:01:29","modified_gmt":"2008-01-20T22:01:29","slug":"cloverfield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=2877","title":{"rendered":"Cloverfield"},"content":{"rendered":"

Assume that everything beyond this point is a spoiler.<\/p>\n

It’s tough talking about Cloverfield<\/i><\/a> 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<\/i> 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<\/a> in his original review of Blair Witch<\/i>, 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.”<\/p>\n

Except then Cloverfield<\/i> up and shows us what’s making that noise, and in fairly large detail. Which I guess is where the comparisons to Godzilla<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i>. Both are panicked flights from hostile (and ultimately unknowable) alien threats, viewed from the ground-level — again as Roger Ebert writes<\/a> — “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<\/i>, but I also wasn’t too disappointed when the movie ended after about eighty minutes.<\/p>\n

In the end, I feel like Cloverfield<\/i> 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>. 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.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[238],"class_list":["post-2877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2877"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2877\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}