Cloverfield Movie Review

This movie review is on Cloverfield which is a horror/thriller/sci-fi movie, directed by Matt Reeves and produced by J.J. Abrams. Cloverfield stars Mike Vogal, Michael Stahl-David, T.J. Miller, Jessica Lucas and Lizzy Caplan. It is a modern day movie set mostly at night time on the streets of New York city.

The movie starts off at a leaving party for the main character Rob (Michael Stahl-David) when a loud crashing noise is heard from outside, it sounds like an earthquake so everyone rushes to the roof to take a closer look. Then everyone rushed outside and the city started to be evacuated, people made their way to the bridge to leave the city and it is then shown what made the noise. The few main characters decide to stay in the city and look for someone, will they make it out alive? The rest of the movie resolves around hearing people scream, run and shoot.

The movie is shot from the perspective of a video camera of which one of the characters are recording all throughout the movie. This may be bad for people who suffer from motion sickness, as in parts the camera is all over the place and you cannot see what is happening. At times watching the movie hurt my eyes because of the camera shaking so much. Sometimes I had to look away and something that wasnt moving to re-focus and then carry on watching the movie.

The acting of the movie was ok, it wasn’t the best, it wouldn’t make sense to use big name actors in this film, so i’m glad they kept to the low profile ones. There is no music score in Cloverfield apart from the credits at the end. I didn’t mind this because the movie was action packed and wouldn’t make sense if music was applied to it.

The directing of the movie is very good, as it is not revealed at first what it is that caused the loud banging and collapsing of buildings at the beginning. This keeps the viewers tense and gripped to the movie as they wait to see what it is.

Overall I would give the movie 7 out of 10, I found the marketing aspect better than the actual movie itself. The story line and the special effects in the movie were good and also they way in which you feel you are there in the movie; however I did not like the idea of the camera being the view of a video recorder, as I felt I was missing out on seeing what was happening outside the view of the camera. If you liked Blair Witch Project, you may well like Cloverfield, if you watched Blair Witched Project and had to turn it off because of the shaky camera, I would reccomend this movie.

7/10.