This is a horrible film to try to write a review about, basically the movie is presented as a personal video which has been discovered by the Military in what was once Central Park, so basically you are watching a home movie without the fancy lighting effects and the professional editing you would expect from a normal movie. Now watching home movies are not something I would want to spend any time doing and especially if it was as boring as going for a day out with your girlfriend to Coney Island!

Thankfully we are saved from what could have been a soppy home video as some idiot has picked up the camcorder to make an equally boring home movie of a leaving party. We are introduced to a few of the characters in the way you would expect with a home movie and of course you don’t really get much character development. As anyone who has used a camcorder you know that if you start and stop filming when you watch the tape back you might get a few seconds of what was previously on the tape – which we do in this home movie.

During this mind numbingly boring leaving party we learn that it is Rob (Michael Stahl-David) who is leaving and he also happens to be the person who left the tape with his date to Coney Island with Beth (Odette Yustman) a few weeks earlier in the camcorder. The most exciting thing that happens at the party is that Beth turns up with some new bloke on her arm (guess she did not like Coney Island!) an argument follows and Beth leaves but before we are forced back into watching random drunks talking to the camera to wish Rob all the best with his new job we hear an explosion and rushing to switch on television we get to see a news report all caught on tape that tells us that a tanker has capsized off Ellis Island we get to see news helicopters flying around the Statue of Liberty.

The people in the party all decide to go up on to the roof of the building to get a better look and of course the person holding the camera follows suit. We get to experience first hand what was running though the minds of those people up on the roof, had terrorists once more attacked the city (as a building blows up and scatters debris towards them). Deciding that being up on the roof is not a very good idea they all run down stairs to the street where the severed head from the Statue of Liberty comes to its final resting place - Maybe this shows how society is changing instead of mad panic we get to see people with there camera phones out taking photos of the destruction. (I find myself wondering if when the twin towers were destroyed were the citizens of New York standing with the tourists taking photos?)

Hud (T.J. Miller) who has been doing a fantastic job as cameraman so far explains to Rob that people will want to see these events as they unfold so he will continue to document the destruction. I am sure most normal people would want to get as far away from any danger as possible so as Rob decides that it would be better to leave the city… (Spoilers ahead)

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I have mentioned before that I prefer films that explain what has happened and why it has happened and I knew before going to see this film that I would be rather irritated when I left the cinema, and not just because of the motion sickness caused by the camera work but because I knew this film would leave many things unanswered. Because it was presented as a home movie I knew that any information passed on to us the viewers would be thin on the ground. Just imagine how good Independence Day would have been if it was filmed in the same way and we were just following a normal member of the public and that member of the public did not have access to the President or to Area 51. We would not know about the alien mother ship in orbit or that they were going from city to city destroying everything.

Cloverfield an interesting idea but I want a movie that I can sit down and enjoy without sending my brain into meltdown and without the mass viral marketing this film has had. It is worth seeing but not one I would get on DVD.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 11:38 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.