I thought Cloverfield even did one better than something like Signs (a movie I love) because it did just as good a job of giving us a look at the disaster from a personal level, while still being huge and epic like an ID4. It’s interesting to me that so many people have singled out Hud’s death as the moment that didn’t work for them. Maybe it’s because by that point in the movie I was kinda just looking forward to the end because I didn’t want my cookies to get tossed, but I didn’t find anything off-putting about it.

Good point about the whole Blair Witch Project/found footage argument, too. Seems to me that calling Cloverfield a ripoff is like calling, I dunno, Cold Mountain a rip of Gone With the Wind. Everything’s been done before.

I have always appreciated “disaster” movies that take place on a smaller, more personal level, over the balls-out, grand-scale epics. I suppose in an effort to simplify that last statement, I could say that I preferred the film SIGNS over INDEPENDENCE DAY. I don’t mean to say that I didn’t like ID4, in fact it was quite the opposite. I did enjoy it as an experience – as a huge summer blockbuster. It was fun. I just found more to connect to, and more scenes that emotionally hooked me, in the more low-key SIGNS. I don’t want every detail spilled out to me. For me it is far scarier, and emotionally engaging, to have to fill in details on my own. In other words, what I create in my own mind is probably better, at least to me, that anything you could have shown me. That is where a film like CLOVERFIELD excels.

Well, it excels in that category in most every way except for the Hud death scene/monster reveal. Like others here have already stated that moment just didn’t work. It was perhaps the first time in the movie where I grimaced and pulled back. For a moment I was reminded that I was watching a movie and that they were catering to the audience. I bit my tongue and remembered that they probably added a scene like this because most people would want a “reveal shot” of the beast. I hated it. In my opinion the film would have been better without it. If Hud truly needed to die before the final scene, which story-wise I can understand, then I am convinced there were far better ways to accomplish that without breaking the feel of the movie.

Even with that scene I still found the film to be highly effective. I had a great time watching it and can’t wait to see it again.

Oh, and did I read in this thread that some people want to roast CLOVERFIELD for not being original because of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT? Or maybe the better way to phrase it is ‘why praise this film when blair witch did it first’?

Well, TBWP did not do it first. The “found footage” from a disaster (or terrible event) did not begin with that 1999 film. In other words, please do not use that to bash CLOVERFIELD, while praising TBWP. Both are equally guilty for harvesting an idea that had been done far before their existence, just like most films from our lifetimes.

So yeah… good flick… better than I expected.

And yeah, I completely agree about not caring about everyone else’s opinions, cuz I feel like I was the only one who loved it!

If you haven’t seen it yet, just let yourself get sucked into the movie. It is like going to a haunted house

Great great great great great!

All I have to say is this: Wow. Just…wow. Freaky, fucking freaky. My eyes are completely open now. My heart’s racing, and I’m a guy who is squeamish at dead, bloody bodies, and there lots, especially exploding Marlene. Ick.

I had a theory that the bite turns other people into the Mini-Monsters

Matt, you are 10000000% correct about everything in that movie. Hell, I didn’t even notice the meteor at the end! Nice!

Now, on to Waiterbot’s review!

LOST comes back on Thursday??? What the? Where did the time go! Thanks for the reminder. I might have missed it.

So I gave in and started Googling for these alleged LOST references in Cloverfield. I can’t attest for the validity of any of this stuff because a quick glance at the wiki site didn’t confirm anything, but the biggie appears to be this: http://img512.imageshack.us/img512/4517/vlcsnap6932188yp4.png
That could easily be a fake, but I saw it in a few different places. It’s the Dharma logo!
Some of the other things people are claiming are appearances by the numbers (which I was totally expecting) and from things like Geronimo Jackson posters and McCutcheon’s scotch. Which is exactly the kind of stuff I was trying to watch for, but the camerawork was just too much for me I guess.

Fun little spot-the-crossover bits aside, I think the real connection between LOST and Cloverfield is the use of the flashback technique, though they did it totally differently. I’ve been thinking about it a lot the last few days, because, you know, LOST comes back on Thursday (:!:) and I have no life. I knew about the flashbacks ahead of time for Cloverfield and I was wondering if they would follow the LOST formula, which is more or less: one or more people acting inscrutable in the present day, and then you have the flashbacks, and the revelations, and so on. But they changed it up and instead of using the flashbacks to expand the plot they dispatched all the suspense about what happened between Rob and Beth fairly quickly in the main timeline, and instead they used the flashbacks to remind us why Rob wasn’t going to give up on trying to save her, which is just oh-so-romantic and bittersweet. But then of course they have to be extra awesome and sneak the Coney Island splashdown in there too. It was a really cool twist on what I was expecting.