Obscure Movie Review Of The Day: Cloverfield

So when I heard Cloverfield was going to be filmed as if it were all via video camera, I was worried.

See, I don't usually get nauseous for things. I love roller coasters, I can usually read when I'm in a car, and I'm the guy who gets recruited to clean up gross messes around the house.

But two things get me. Facing backwards in a car, and watching jerky home movies.

So I was worried.

Back around the time Blair Witch came out in the theatres, I remember seeing warnings in ticket booths that the movie was giving people really bad motion sickness.

When I went to see Cloverfield, there was no such warning. So I was a little hopeful. After all, this wasn't just a bunch of kids improving with video cameras. This was the guys at Bad Robot. They could give the impression of it being handheld, without having it be so hurkey-jurkey as to actually be unpleasant.

Sort of how movie dialogue is sort of designed to give the impression of how real people talk, without actually being how real people talk.

However, when I entered the actual theatre, there was a puddle of vomit on the floor just inside the door.

I guess that was as good a warning sign for motion sickness as any.

That's the only bad thing I have to say about this movie.

If "Everything about this movie is great, except that it might make you sick," is a good review, than this is a good review.

And I hope that's a good review, because I thought it was a terrific movie.

As far as movies go, this is way more of a short story than a novel, in terms of both length (it's only like 85 minutes long) and character development. And like short stories are the polished gems of the fiction world, this movie got just about everything right.

That's not to say it's a feel-good film, because it's not. If I had to give a film professor a one sentence "Theme" for this one, I'd probably say something like, "Doing what you think you should do is sometimes more important than how it all comes out."

So if you're still talking to friends to decide whether to see it or not, count me as a yes vote, as long as nothing in the above turns you off too much.