I saw this. I care deeply about monsters and (SPOILERS) nuclear weapons and videos causing vomit and many other things this movie deals with so I hope you can extend to me the trust you may fear to lend to others. Anyway: definitive review, plus better ideas for monster movies courtesy me and also copyrighted and actually already treatmented if anyone wants to take a meeting.

FIRST FIFTEEN MINUTES: Really loose character development for several urban weiner types. The obviously dumbest one gets to work the camera. The rest of them are over-dressed and sort of hard to tell apart. People walk out during these scenes.

TRAILER STUFF: All the monster you get for a while. (Except cool TV chopper footage of it scratching its big scaly belly on buildings, and awesome news footage of tiny parasite monsters silently chowing flailing infantrymen.)

BETTER MOVIE IDEA: If this whole movie was TV news footage, it would have ruled. Anchorfolks devoured on live remote and shouting NCOs shoving cameramen around and Sky One casually batted into the pavement—awesome scenes. Like in that new War Of The Worlds when they show the TV news footage of the tripods strutting around stomped New York. Disaster footage mediated by TV news is the real frontier of this fake-documentary making. Everyman found-film is what they think is interesting but we’re really primed and ready to watch live-on-the-scene local affiliate coverage of severe monster attack. Plus that excuses higher-quality footage and better editing. I’m sure some committee demanded specific Cloverfield characters but in real life they still show car chases on TV for hours and all you can identify with there is whether or not the fugitive has a sunroof.

ALL MILITARY SCENES: Totally cool. National Guard in fine form fearlessly shooting small-arms at a giant monster. In simpler days the domestic military confidently handled or at least stood up to all giant creatures as a matter of policy, and here old-school monster raiders ride again. Even in non-combat scenes the troops come off completely capable and admirable. At one point the monster is smashing tanks just off-camera and some soldier just walks to a Humvee and casually pops open the passenger door. CGI amnesia or the best-trained army in the world? 28 Weeks Later also set up a promising Army-kill-monsters scenario but sadly U.S. forces are overwhelmed on the ground in minutes and call for boring (and overwhelming) air support. Not sure how much either of these say about current force doctrine.

BETTER MOVIE IDEA: Strangelove meets Godzilla or “Monsters On Maple Street” meets the ‘53 War Of The Worlds: “dark” late-’50s/early ’60s American monster movie with creature vs. U.S. military at the height of the cold war. Waves of SAC B-52s on carpet-bombing runs, primitive nuclear chaos, civil defense apparatus mobilized and collapsed as the monster won’t go down and America gets more desperate to survive as a superpower (while refusing foreign aid and worrying about foreign agitation during the chaos.). Great sets, costumes, a few campy minutes during the intro and then the movie gets harsh and creepy. Ends like Kiss Me Deadly.

SUBWAY SEQUENCE: Boring junk in the subways, featuring the boring parasite monsters, which are like screechy rubbery spiders. So much less fun than almost every tunnel/duct scene in Aliens by a factor of parts-per-million. In related scientific news: when I was in the actual city of New York, there were no monsters so I went to the Natural History Museum and learned about ‘sea snow,’ which is the fog of soft silty particles drifting over the very bottom of the deepest ocean. Sea snow is made of the waste excreta from every other sea animal living anywhere above the bottom of the deepest ocean and even more discouragingly also made of the absolutely decayed remains of everything that died swimming around in the ocean. Since nature finds a place for every disgusting thing there is an entire ecosystem (existing in total oppressive high-pressure darkness, with everything bloated and floppy and ice-white) kept alive by feeding on sea snow.

GOING TO FIND THE GIRL IN THE SKYSCRAPER: Boring and takes a long time and nothing happens except one lonely confused parasite attacks them and is crippled after a kick from a guy wearing dress-casual shoes. If you felt sad for the dying head spider in The Thing your heart will sag at this. Gruesome moment when they hoist the girl off the rebar but anticlimax resumes immediately.

CHOPPER EVACUATION AND MONSTER BOMBING: Finally a few good shots of the monster. The army is very effficient and pleasant during this sequence even though the monster is killing them. They help people into evac choppers one by one and barely if ever use curse words. Also they’re still chucking people into UH-1 Hueys—I’d think they’d use Blackhawks or something now but the adorable Huey is forever held in the national psyche as what they send to evacuate you so it’s nice to see it for romance’s sake.

BEST SCENE IN THE MOVIE: Stealth bomber flies by at dawn and cam pans down from chopper to watch bombs in bloom. Great light and lots of color as they splatter the monsters back and it falls through a building. Then when people are cheering the dirty smoke cloud, the monster reaches out and claws the Huey.

BETTER MOVIE IDEA: Broad daylight monster insanity. The only problem with this is avoiding burnout since the film dynamic would run from ’saturated’ to ‘overload,’ but there should be at least one film chronicling unbelievable monster-caused destruction in practically forensic detail. Like monster grabs an attacking battleship out of the harbor, swings it sideways through a line of skyscrapers, then breaks it in half and sucks out all the sailors, and then spits sailor goo into a line of trees, where it drips down in strings. All humans in this movie would be identifiable (if at all) only as occupational stereotypes (“president” or “pilot” or “pedestrian”) and the overall tone would be like nature-film footage of a bunch of ants crawling on an alligator. It takes the concerted efforts of the entire human race to stop this monster, who ruins not just cities but the course of continental coastlines, and perhaps this monster is so awesome that it takes several decades to kill, and an entire generation of humans grows up resigned to the possibility of eventual monster attack the same way we are willing to risk earthquakes or sea-borne tornadoes. After hours of the most spectacularly ridiculous footage ever filmed, the monster is finally severely wounded by a doomsday device, and spends another twenty or so minutes heaving through a city like a gutshot buffalo, finally crumpling in a pile of its own gore and dying so slowly and plaintively—close shots of thousands of wet soulful eyes—that the monster genre is forever obsoleted as all audiences everywhere realize that the true monsters were always them.

CLOVERFIELD CONCLUSION: The monster eats the camera guy but it seems kind of forced. You hear it slurping but you don’t hear it loving it. Then he drops half the camera guy on the ground and wanders away. It’s like when you feed a dog a grape. You get a nice clear daylight shot but there’s no charm. Then the military nukes New York. That’s a great ending and it’s a little touching when the guy and the girl are under the bridge but it could have been cooler—it would have been really at odds with the sort of shallow feel of the rest of the film but I’ll grant something a little sacred to fictive last-minutes-alive, and it would have been nice if the realization that they weren’t going to make it visibly clouded their eyes while they panic-mumbled final words into the camera, and then a nice white flash and cut to static and we’re done.

PERSONAL REVIEWER CONCLUSION: Sadly not worth it even though I love monsters and hope they destroy everything forever. Great format with a lot of potential but the characters/backstory didn’t carry without the (defaulted) promise of massive monstering to come, and the between-monster scenes were confusing and boring unless they had the military involved. Natural advice: should have chucked the civilians and let the government take over. Soldiers in ruined American streets make resonant visuals and monsters grant plenty of action: Godzilla: It Can’t Happen Here would be a great movie but no one will give me the money to make it for you. I’d also get you an awesome cast, and the soundtrack would gut you, and you’d take the plush monster doll to cuddle at night. I bet someone knows someone so have them email me.

Tags: cloverfield, godzilla, monster, review