I don't like found footage. I can't think of one film I liked of that format, I'm not too keen on REC and Spanish horror is one of my favourite genres, which suggests I'm not singling out Cloverfield.
The marketing of Cloverfield blew me away, it was the first piece of viral marketing I got involved in and I got totally sucked in and I looked forward to it as much as, say, The Matrix. The film failed to live up to the hype.
Poor script, Caplan is an awesome and was totally suffocated by the piss poor script.
I've taken baths deeper than the characters, maybe that was the point, but I need a little character development to buy into them, and I saw none.
An entirely unmemorable film for something that was billed as an epic monster movie (again, great marketing), I realise now while writing this I'd have to go back and watch again to find more stuff I dislike about it. But then I'd have to get my hands on a time machine and travel back 5 years and buy into the hype again, and to be honest, it's not worth the trouble.
Hype is always a bad bed brother when it comes to any kind of art. To fully appreciate something it is always best to be as close to a clean white canvas going in as it is possible to be. Very hard with something marketed like mad, or involving well known artists or tied down by genre.
Maybe it was because I expected exactly nothing from the movie why I enjoyed it so much, I also saw it on TV which, unusually for a film, is exactly where I think this kind of movie works best on, as opposed to a large big screen which sits uncomfortably with a "filmed on HD Cam" format (how many home movies of yours have you watched on an IMAX? [Insert joke here]).
The characters are shallow, hipster type annoying folk, and that is to the detriment of the first 25 minutes or so, there would have been better ways of showing a "normal" situation before the shit hits fan, without having such a big bunch of knobjockeys to put up with for so long, but for me that just made the death scenes all the more enjoyable! Probably not an intended facet, but there you go.
What I really like, and what it did great IMO was telling a microscopic story on a B Movie scale while somewhere another AAA monster movie was going off all around them. We, sitting here watching, were only privvy to whatever had been filmed on the handhelds. Glimpses of the bigger picture were there, but they were snapshots, teasing us.
Its consistency on this, from start to finish, its use of NOT showing you things another film would swing its cameras round to reveal, its use of the camera as the least annoying character in the film, along with the idea that your watching a film within another more expensive but never released film, is what I found really fun.
This macro / micro storytelling has been done a bit to death since of course which waters down that particular effect, but at the time I watched it, it drew me in.
Topic: Movie Thread IV (Read 126781 times)
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