Cloverfield: A thrill ride

by Sam Allen
invitevt.com contributor

Regardless of what any sappy critic or animal rights activist says about films being a form of art or a gateway into a persons mind and experiences, the primary purpose of a movie is to entertain. It is a solid form of entertainment. Usually you can tell if a film is entertaining by whether or not Universal Studios has made a roller coaster out of it. Cloverfield is a movie that needs no coaster to prove its worth. What is put together is a roller coaster on screen.

Cloverfield is pure, raw entertainment, regardless of how good the directing or acting or scripting or casting or any other lame details were.

I’m going to skip all of the crap about the acting and just tell you that it’s as good as it needs to be on all sides. If you choose to see this film, then who cares. The most interesting thing to note about the cast is they materialized out of completely nothing. You will not notice any of the cast from anything you’ve seen before (except maybe Lizzy Caplan from “Mean Girls”). And if you look into it, you‘ll find that Odette Yustman was in “Walk Hard” as “Reefer Girl;“ if you think that‘s a big part, remember, she didn’t have a name¼ just “Reefer Girl.“

What separates “Cloverfield” from other movies is all about the cinematography. “Cloverfield” has chosen to go the way of the “Blair Witch Project” to make the film look like it was filmed on a Samsung home video camera. Whoever was behind the camera on this one was told to make every shot look like the camera was held by the audience. This makes for some of the most thrilling scenes on camera.

If you didn’t already know, “Cloverfield” is a monster movie, and that’s not a spoiler. Eighty percent of the film is spent wondering what the monster looks like. You constantly get side peeks and teaser views of a gargantuan being, but that’s all. This makes for a much more thrilling and questioning atmosphere and will leave you guessing throughout the film. I have a personal grudge against films that use CGI in excess, but I’ll make an exception for this one. You will never really notice any faults with the computer animation as the quality of the camera is about as good as any scene from “Open Water” (yes, that was a diss).

Like I said before, this is a film made to purely entertain. Art critics will go in feeling confused and disappointed, while extreme sportsmen will come out feeling quite at peace with the world. Every time there is a massive explosion of a building, the whole theater shakes, and you won’t physically be able to speak to the person next to you. But don’t worry about getting too scared, because Hud (the character behind the camera) will be there to crack a comic relief or two here and there. This film has some decent laughs.

“Cloverfield” is a thrill ride, plain and simple. If you have taste like mine, nothing, not even the increased heart rate, not even the art film snob sitting next to you, not even the lack of snow caps and jelly bellies will wipe the adrenaline-induced grin off your face.

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