The main reason I wanted to see Cloverfield was that J.J. Abrams' name was attached to it, and I like the twisty, turny plots of Alias and Lost. What hadn't crossed my mind was that, since Cloverfield was a monster movie, it was unlikely to have a complicated plot, or even much a plot at all, necessarily -- monster movies, after all, tend to be about spectacle and destruction. And, indeed, the interest in watching Cloverfield lies more in the visuals than the story (apparently there is a back-story, but it's mainly available on associated websites, with only oblique hints in the film that, to see, you either have to know to look for, or be paying closer attention than I was).

Cloverfield is a monster movie seen through the lens of a video camera. It begins at a leaving party in New York, at which Hud (the cameraman) has been tasked with collecting friends' goodbye messages for Rob (for whom the party has been thrown); Hud, however, is more interested in using this as an excuse to talk to Marlena, an attractive girl he's noticed. I would estimate that this section of the movie lasts about fifteen minutes, and it's as tedious as you would expect a video of a complete stranger's party to be.

Then the action starts. The ground shakes, there's a distant explosion, and a large lump of metal lands in the street -- it's the Statue of Liberty's head. We then follow Rob, Hud, Marlena, Rob's brother Jason, and Jason's girlfriend Lily as they try to escape, whilst a giant creature tears up the city, shedding spider-like parasites that have a lethal bite. Over the course of the film, our group diminishes in number. There is spectacle. There is destruction.

Framing the movie as someone's video footage is an interesting choice. The obvious point of comparison is The Blair Witch Project, but the two films are in very different genres: Blair Witch is a creepy horror film that works because of how much it doesn't show; Cloverfield, being in a genre that's expected too show things, might not seem to be the ideal movie to employ shaky camerawork and a monster that's generally only half-glimpsed. And watching it did leave me with a new-found appreciation for the 'stagecraft' of Big FX Scenes.

But what I do think Cloverfield is particularly effective at is showing what it must be like to live through an unimaginable catastrophe. Yes, I can believe that things would be this confused; people wouldn't think straight; some probably would do very heroic/foolhardy things (though perhaps they wouldn't quite take it to such an extreme as Rob, who climbs a skyscraper and leaps across to the next building to rescue his girlfriend -- while insisting that Lily do the same in her party dress and heels) -- and yes, sadly, it would probably end tragically. Cloverfield may well be the most 'realistic' monster movie I've ever seen; certainly it's the most 'down-to-earth'. That doesn't make it the best, nor does it mean I'd want necessarily to see more monster movies made in this style -- but it's an interesting, if flawed, experiment.