So there we were, in the car, driving around looking for a Wal-Mart and trying to decide what to do with the afternoon, or rather with that part of the afternoon in which she wasn’t sprawled naked on the bed while I did Very Evil ThingsTM to her. She had her Blackberry with her, and her Blackberry has access to the Intertubes, and we were driving by a theater, see, and…
Long story short (too late!), we decided to see Cloverfield.
Sweet Jesus, we decided to see Cloverfield.
Now, Cloverfield is a monster movie. Specifically, it’s a monster movie filmed in first person, by a group of kids who were making a home movie of a party and got caught up in New York when monsters attacked. Think Godzilla meets Blair Witch and you’ve got the basic idea.
This movie should have been made of win and awesome. I mean, Godzilla meets Blair Witch. With giant monsters that knock over buildings. In New York. How do you fuck that up? Seriously, how do you fuck that up?
Somehow–don’t ask me how–these people managed to take a giant monster smashing Manhattan, filmed from a first-person point of view, and make it boring. And slightly annoying. And for fuck’s sake, just once I’d like to see a movie monster that isn’t immune to bullets.
Okay, okay, huge monsters might be immune to small-arms fire, I get that. But immune to incendiary bombs dropped from a B2 bomber? C’mon. The movie Aliens showed that monsters can still be scary without being magically immune to bullets. Fer Chrissakes, people, if the only way your monster is scary is that it can take a barrage of hits from tanks and self-propelled howitzers without even blinking, your screenwriter is lazy.
But far be it from me to dwell on the negative! Since I like to keep things upbeat and optimistic, I present to you, in no particular order:
1. Despite the best efforts of the cameraman, nobody in the theater we were in actually vomited.
2. Some of the main characters die, but it’s no big deal because by then you don’t like them or care about them anyway.
3. The movie is only an hour and change long, so you don’t leave the theater wishing you had two hours of your life back like you do at the end of Pirates of the Caribbean 2
4. Six words: Not filmed in Smell-O-Vision!
5. Only about 15% of the movie is occupied by shots of the ground.
6. This movie has at least 90% of your recommended daily allowance of self-absorbed, narcissistic, vaguely attractive (in that Apple commercial, non-threatening kind of way) Gen Yers. After leaving the theater, you won’t need to log on to Facebook for a week!
7. Three more words: Not Maximum Overdrive.
8. William Shatner does not appear anywhere in this movie.
9. Things on fire. You can never truly be unhappy if you can watch things on fire.
10. The typeface used in the opening credits is readable and not displeasing to the eye.
11. You can get the entire movie from the trailer, and not have to see the hour of filler material they padded the film with to make it (nearly) feature length.
12. The dollar theater right down the street is still showing Beowulf, and man, after this dreck, Beowulf is high fucking art.