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| Director: Matt Reeves
Actors: Michael Stahl-david, Mike Vogel, Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, Odette Yustman
Studio: Paramount
This item is no longer available
Rating:  629 reviews
Sales Rank: 4611
Genre: Action
Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Media: Video On Demand
Running Time: 85 Minutes
ASIN: B001AOKA3W
Theatrical Release Date: January 18, 2008
Release Date: November 4, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 629
 A problem in presentation January 27, 2008
Tom Knapp (Lancaster, PA USA)
31 out of 42 found this review helpful
The idea, conceived by producer J.J. Abrams, is brilliant, and the story told here is exciting, riveting stuff. It's tense and, at times, genuinely scary. If not for one little problem, I would have thoroughly enjoyed this film.
The problem is in the presentation.
Since the entire movie is supposed to come from a single hand-held camera, everything is in Shaky-Cam (or, as Roger Ebert aptly called it, "Queasy-Cam"). Hence, the movie quickly and continually induces vertigo in its audience; of the six members of my party, four reported some degree of motion sickness. Somewhere further down in the theater, we heard at least one person vomit.
No matter how good a movie is -- and this one is, in its way, very very good -- it suffers when you can't bear to look at the screen. It's hard to appreciate the filmmaker's craft when you're trying to keep down the buffalo chicken sandwich you foolishly ate on the way to the theater.
by Tom Knapp, Rambles.(net) editor
 Stay away from this trash!. April 18, 2008
Puzzle box (Kuwait)
28 out of 55 found this review helpful
Cloverfield uses the hand-held video camera technique thats supposed to be innovative but its not, this technique of filmmaking has been used many times before so I don't really know what all the fuss is about. The film also combines elements of The Blair Witch Project and the 1998 Godzilla film which both sucked but if you liked those two films then go ahead and knock your self out you might actually enjoy this film, I just though it was awful. The visual disorientation caused by seeing this film through a lens of a shaky hand-held video camera was not a pleasant experience it was like torture. The film opens with a video camera being found in Cloverfield which is the area formerly known as Central Park and from the footage we get to see this horrible film, the footage consists of some people hanging around at an apartment partying and talking to each other wow very fascinating then all of a sudden a large crashing sound is heard and we get to see alot of screaming people on the streets running away from a 300 foot tall lizard monster or whatever (it did look pathetic), the film didn't really have a plot its just a few people looking for a friend who needs help and thats it. The cast looks like they were auditioning for MTV's the real world, they were absolute crap but I guess the director was looking for a more realistic point of view and the ending was very anti-climactic you could barely see what was going on and I just didn't find this film entertaining at all in fact it was one of the worst movies of 2008, I'm not exactly sure why I bothered watching this film in the first place I suggest you avoid this unless you liked The Blair Witch Project and Godzilla 1998.
Skip it, you're not missing much. April 21, 2008
Stephen P. Weaver (Medina, Ohio USA)
22 out of 37 found this review helpful
Seriously. I've seen many movies in my day, but none of them (including a certain one about a witch) made me ever look away because I though I'd be nauseous. Seriously, when you have to close your eyes to stop them from straining, something is wrong.
With crappy hand-held realism aside, the movie characters and story were a letdown. I know a lot of it was about this viral marketing rah rah, but who cares ultimately when the movie is dumb?
First of all, the initial scene at the party feature some of the most crappy dialog and scenes to date. I almost fell asleep with how dumb it was. Then when things got moving, the people who we follow on their stupid quest through the city get even dumber! They feel it's perfectly fine to go towards the destruction and to walk under a mega-huge creature that's killing people left and right.
The guy running the camera is one of the most annoying characters in history. He kept saying "Rob! Rob! Rob! Rob! Rob!" over and over. I wanted him to be slapped repeatedly. When they finally get to their final destination, the story keeps up with it's dumbness. A girl impaled? Oh she's fine!
The movie utterly crappy elements could not be redeemed, for me, by anything they put on screen.
 The Monster Mash January 25, 2008
Mark Eremite (Seoul, South Korea)
21 out of 31 found this review helpful
The real goal of any movie worth its salt is to draw us head-first into a reality that is not our own. To help us inhabit new places, sometimes fantastic, sometimes harsh and gritty, but always powerful. Stories are really beside the point. So are easy answers and resolutions. No movie that has ever made a truly lasting impression on anyone did so solely because it had a cool plot or a nifty twist at the end. There's always something more there; something that makes you lose yourself for a moment and become someone else, somewhere else.
The world has grown so jaded, and people so skeptical, that this isn't easy to do. J.J. Abrams, of Lost and Alias fame, is a man with weird and wonderful ideas, and he has created in "Cloverfield" a movie that isn't deep or profound, but which resonates with powerful humanity, which ripples with very believable terror. I haven't felt this enraptured and excited by a film since I was thirteen years old, back when I didn't care so much how meaningful and thoughtful a movie was, as long as it managed to grab me without letting go.
I will say this right now: shame on you if you whine about the shaky camera work. Boo to you if you moan about the lack of a plot. And go soak your head if you complain about the frustrating lack of clear images or action scenes. By now, you should already know that this flick is filmed documentary-style, through the lens of a single camera carried by one very confused and harried citizen of New York as that city undergoes attack from some unknown thing or things. Those of you with tender tummies and a susceptibility to vertigo should stay away.
Too bad for you, because you're missing one hell of a ride. Universal Studios makes millions out of roller coasters designed to make us feel like we're in a movie. Reality television shows have spent years pretending to showcase real people at their worst and best. "Cloverfield" bypasses all of that with the most gorgeous ease, seducing you into a young man's going away party (he's leaving on the morrow to work in Japan, a clever nod to the Godzilla inspiration this movie banks on and surpasses), and then completely knocking the socks off of you with a series of horrific moments that are captured in the queasy, quake-y quaver of a handheld camera.
It's a monster movie, first and foremost, but it's done in true J.J. Abrams style, with a flippant attitude toward anything but the common sense and scalding fear of the characters who are holding the camera. There may be some who might harp about how unlikely it is that a single man would videotape the systematic destruction of New York for seven straight hours while his life is on the line; in a world where every cell phone has a camera and most people are dying for their chance to be in the frame, where news reporters place themselves on the frontlines of major wars just to catch a scoop, where websites like Youtube fester with millions of snippets of people being everything from goofy to grotesque, I say the movie rings quite true. Besides, I say again, it's a monster movie.
Like no monster movie I can recall seeing, "Cloverfield" provides what they all wish they could: the fear of really and truly being there. The panicked confusion. The hasty shock and dust-soaked amazement. Monster movies of yore have tried to scare us silly by giving us the horrific grand view of things, when few besides superheroes and dictators ever experience life with the grand scheme of things in mind. We are individuals, with our precious loves and single lives, and when New York rumbles with fireballs and fear, what really scares us is the threat to us and our loved ones.
"Cloverfield" sidesteps the grandiose issues of military might or radioactive origins. It doesn't give us harried politicians wondering what's to be done. It even pointedly avoids discussions of longterm, worldwide impacts. "What is that?" one of the characters screams. The cameraman, in one of the movie's best lines, dismisses the question by simply saying, "It's a terrible thing."
Terrible it is. Let the movie hold your hand, and it will usher you into that powerfully personal wonder and horror that so many of us forget can still exist. Viewing this movie, I got sick, I was disoriented, I squinted to see through the fuzzy frames and the agonizingly distorted camera work. It was hard to watch.
I would turn around and watch it again in a second. And I'd probably love it just as much.
Good idea, bad camera February 14, 2008
Luciano Jr. (Sao Paulo, SP Brazil)
19 out of 39 found this review helpful
The whole idea of having a point of view from a small group is very interesting, indeed. However, the way they conduct their "amateur" camera seems worst than any 3-year-old child holding a camera. I guess it's a wrong idea thinking that an amateur camera could mean a thought like that. At end, I could see only 3 or 5 minutes of this film. The result is awful.
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