Before I delve into the bulk of this review, i find it incumbent upon myself to establish the fact that half of the Cloverfield story is embedded within the complex, 7 month-long viral marketing framework that was crafted as a hype-generation platform preluding the film’s debut. Since this so-called “Pre-Cloverfield Phenomenon” is essentially quite ancillary to the actual content of the movie, I won’t be extrapolating within this writing; but I have already done that in full in an article posted two months ago. You can find that here, it would be advisable to read that first, as it serves as an adequate backdrop for the whole Cloverfield project. In any case, on to the review.

Its an often proliferated saying that one should always enter the movie theater with a sense of pre-established low expectations, ergo no matter how mediocre or outrightly abhorable a film is, you won’t be disappointed since the benchmarks were already delineated to quite low standards. I usually exercise this preliminary psychological mantra, the last time I was truly anticipating a magnum opus before I had seen a movie was when the lights dimmed and the picture began five years ago, right before The Return of the King. But in that case I think it was well justified to retain a healthy reserve of excited hype, and my expectations, which were already quite high, were exceeded far beyond anything I could have imagined.

Yesterday I walked in to an opening day screening of Cloverfield, a movie I had no knowledge of a mere 8 months prior, a movie that wasn’t even in pre-production a year ago. And yet, to my gross folly, I had afforded it a relatively high preemptive appraisal. Having entrenched myself in the myriad of advertising devices and alternative reality games gravitating around this movie for the last half-year, I was intrigued to find out if the often meandering, superfluously “intricate”, somewhat annoying at times marketing ploys woudl pay off in the end with a grand fulmination masterfully interlaced with the prose of the film. All the hyper-realistic, conspiracy-laden “backstory” framed within the pre-Cloverfield campaign framework, compiled with J.J. Abrams forte for composing media saturated with rich, multi-faceted plotlines and deeply engrossing character archetypes and development, seemed like the ideal recipe for a superb movie.

But even in the midst of all this excitement and heated anticipation, not too far within the recesses of my mind I had the lingering sense that this entire enterprise was largely a facade, that this whole advertising campaign scheme was just too exaggerated and overtly silly at times to be non-duplicitious and that a lot of people were going to be delivered something completely unexpected and disappointing on January 18th. I should have paid higher regard to this intuition, as unfortunately it turned out to be quite right.

It appears that my latent skepticicism and suspicions proved too true. The meticulously engineered marketing campaign that served as an overture to opening day was merely a tool to envisage a false-portrait of reality, an incredibly clever concealment protocol designed with the sole intention of hyperbolizing and sensationalizing what Cloverfield’s far more uuninspiring and non-compelling premise actually was: a generic monster movie framed under a Blair Witch shaky-cam concept. The plot tapestry woven by all the Cloverfield propaganda machine, brimming with ruthless and shadowy corporate juggernauts, bio-research, violent rebel-outfits, and likewise, was completely in absentia from the movie.

What we got instead was a largely cliche-ridden and depthless teen-thriller flick without a trace of plot-composition ingenuity. In fact, at first I thought I had sat in at the wrong movie; the opening was just unforgivably atrocious. For 20 minutes we’re given host to the ghastly, almost literally sickening spectacle of some semi-retarded goon walking about a stereotypical New York young contemporary  ”Facebook-socialite” party, listening in on some of the stupidest and unbelievably non-genuine scripted dialogue I’ve ever heard in a non-comedic movie. It goes on and on, within the first 15 minutes we’ve been introduced to a whole cast of unappealing, uninteresting templatic characters and who they’ve slept with. The whole time I’m thinking, “ok, this is just an over-extended opening, its going to end any moment now, any minute now they’ll cut to the action, come on, any second now, just keep on enduring, it’ll pay off…”.

But no, it didn’t end any time soon, it went on for over a quarter of an hour. I just paid $8 to see what was purportedly the scariest and most innovative monster movie of all time, and isntead I’m subjected to what could have very well been the latest American Pie iteration. I don’t know what the hell they were thinking, was this Abrams’ miserable attempt to paly “hipster” and seem cool for all the teenage prats in the audience? Its noteworthy to point out that theres a line early on that pretty much quintessentially describes the characters at play in this film:

“Rob (the protagaonist), you’re a douchebag.”

Crude, but adequate. New York City is under the merciless onslaught of a gargantuan monstrocity, and we’re stuck tagging along with a group that’s for the most part made up of stock, transparent losers, attempting to sympathize with their precarious situation whilst enduring their at times extraordinarily idiotic conversations. Seriously now, couldn’t we have come up with a more swashbuckling, or at least serious entourage of heroes? Manhattan is on the brink of absolute annihilation, and we have to observe the escapades of emotionally-insecure 20-somethings?

There finally is a conceptual transition from a trainwreck romantic teen comedy to a monster thriller, but the story simply doesn’t cross over. By the end of the movie virtually all of the questions anyone wants answers in this sort of an affair (what exactly is the monster? where did it come from? what impelled it? was it ever truly destroyed?) were left completely unanswered. By the time the credits start rolling, you’ll know more about the sex-lives of the banal and by-the-book two-dimensional characters than you’ll know about the nature of the only character anyone gives a damn about, the monster. This, above all else, testifies to the absolute synoptical bankruptcy of this film, which is a serious betrayal on the production’s part to the legions of fans who had rightfully set their bars as high as Bad Robot had touted this picture.

Where Cloverfield does succeed is in the core intensity of the action. Abrams seemed it prudent to compensate really any semblance of a seriously-crafted storyline with adrenaline-pumped filmographic overdrive. This is a pretty exhilarating movie, and it boasts arguably the best FX in any film produced in this style; granted thats not saying that much, but put that aside for now. Some scenes are pretty shocking, and one generally won’t be bored whilst watching.

Analagously, Cloverfield is perfectly tantamount to a roller-coaster. Its bumpy, exciting and far too short. Its fun while it lasted, yet leaves people with a distinct sense of a lot to be desired, even motion-sickness. If taken at face value, as simply a cookie-cutter Holywood thriller with lots of bangs, explosions, blood and a big monster, coupled with stupid and artificially constructed characters, seasoned with ridiculously lame dialogue and a pathetically facile romantic plot device, you’ve got yourself an average action flick. Fork out the $8, watch it in the cinemas with your friends, have fun for the ride. Don’t expect much and don’t bother with the DVD.

It saddens me that the above paragraph is ultimately what my final verdict of this, a movie I had thought was going to be and am still convinced could have been much more. J.J. Abrams can be fully implicated in this regard, and I’m quite certain that the general consensus from the filmgoing community of overall dissatisfaction and disappointment over this project will be of serious detriment to his credibility. Let this be a lesson to all filmmakers: if you’re going to make just an average, unastonishing movie, have the damn sense to not disperse flagrantly false advertising, it’ll give you a Cloverfield-sized monster bite in the ass in the long run.

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