Note: I wrote this review the day after Cloverfield was released, just after watching the movie. I delayed posting it because I felt it was too pessimistic. However, upon reflection, I realize this is pretty much on par with the rest of my movie reviews, so I’m cleaning out the “Drafts” bin.

I love a good thriller and I love a good mystery. If you promise both of those with a trailer that graciously doesn’t distill the entire plot of the movie in 15 seconds then I’m pretty much already standing in line at the Cinerama. Nice work J.J. I’d love for your example—an alternative to culture-spamming the movie synopsis across all spectrum of media—to become the norm.

Cloverfield is difficult to watch. I consider myself a hardened soul, nearly impervious to disorienting camera convulsions—not out of superior physiology mind you—but typically a potent mixture of perseverance, spite, and judicial application of Maritime’s Jolly Roger. I hate overzealous camera shake in movies but as a frequent movie-goer in this day I’ve come to feel it’s a necessary penance.

I digress. Cloverfield’s major flaw isn’t the camera shake, but the botched early character development. The lack of sincerity, the blanket of unreality at the start of the film cheats the rest of the movie out of what it deserves…genuine attachment to central characters.

So What’s Great in Cloverfield?
Hud is the guy who carriers the camera for the majority of the film, and while he’s physically in the background, providing narration, he’s reduced to being a mechanical (and frequently comic) device. The camera lens is a barrier between him and reality, and capturing becomes more important than feeling—despite the tragic circumstances. Even facing death taking pictures takes precedent. “Hud” conjures H.U.D., a “heads up display” in a fighter cockpit or increasingly popular as informational readouts projected onto consumer car windshields or motorcycle helmet visors. Hud is a transparent purveyor of information, and the camera that lets us experience his trauma cheats him out of that experience.

That’s the important place that Cloverfield goes. The beginning of the film introduces the footage as property of the Department of Defense. An evidence. An entry in a database. A visual archive and nothing more.

At what cost do we come by our digital rememberences?