With an aggressive marketing campaign, Cloverfield was poised to make a splash on the theatrical scene. Like The Blair Witch Project and Snakes On A Plane before it, the buzz started in earnest on the Internet. For awhile, the film was simply known as 1-18-08 in cyberspace; clues, theories, and plot points were showing up on web sites and being talked about on film forums everywhere.
If you believed the hype, the film eventually known as Cloverfield was destined to be one of the greatest suspense films ever made. Produced by Lost creator J.J. Abrams and written by Lost writer Drew Goddard, fans of the show had reason to be excited. The amateur trailers circulating around online gave fans reason to hope for an old school monster movie. Unfortunately, Cloverfield falls well short of those expectations.
Cloverfield has a very unoriginal story. Some sort of monster attacks New York. That is pretty much the thrust of it. That's been done in Godzilla, It Came from Beneath the Sea, and countless others. The only thing that makes Cloverfield different from all the rest is that director Matt Reeves (Felicity) and the others involved in the project make no effort to explain what the "thing" is, where it came from, or what it wants. Having none of this information makes it all seem extraneous and difficult to care about.
Of course, Cloverfield does have human characters. As the film opens, Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David) is about to relocate to Japan and his friends are throwing him a going away party. Among the party-goers are Rob's brother Jason (Mike Vogel), his best friend Hud (T.J. Miller), and friends Lily (Jessica) and Marlena (Lizzy Caplan). All of a sudden, the building starts to shake and the news claims a tanker has tipped over near the Statue of Liberty. But outside, as the head of Lady Liberty rolls down the street, it is clear that a tanker is not responsible for the sudden chaos. So, the question quickly becomes, what is?
Meanwhile, Rob's only concern is to get across town and find his girlfriend Beth (Odette Yustman), who left the party earlier in the evening. With the monster in full attack mode, all of Rob's party friends decide they have to go with him to check on Beth, even as everyone else is fleeing the city. One can understand being concerned for your girlfriend, but the suspension of disbelief that has to take place to believe that a group of good looking twenty-somethings would go back into the face of danger like that is a bit much.
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