Cloverfield is a wakeup call to all those useless Hollywood directors out there who think relying solely on CGI and totally ignoring storyline or characters can make a good film. The one and only good thing I can say about this movie is that yes, the special effects are truly awesome. However that’s where any praise has to be cut off like a French aristocrats head. I also have to apologise for giving away most of the plot below, but there really is nothing else to talk about on this film, and explaining the “story”, if you can call it that, takes less than 3 minutes.

I’ll start from the beginning. The film commences with us looking through the lens of a handycam, Blair Witch Project style, with a man peacefully at home in a Manhattan apartment recording his girlfriend. We then get a bit of static on the screen, and someone has obviously started recording over the tape. We find ourselves at a party, a leaving party for the main characters brother, whose name I can neither remember, nor be bothered to look up, such was the egregiousness of this movie, so we’ll hereon refer to him as “the brother”. This party scene goes on for a good 25 minutes not going anywhere, maybe longer than 25 minutes,  I drifted off a few times if I’m perfectly honest. The handycam takes us through a group of people drinking and eating, each saying their “goodbye and good-luck” piece to “the brother” who is due to depart for Japan the following day. I know character development is, and should be, a key factor in every film. However, by all movie laws, the characters are in fact permitted to actually do something while you’re developing their character. No? Obviously Matt Reeves (director) missed out on that lecture at the Holywood school of rubbish directors.

After twenty five or so minutes of absolutely nothing happening, the handycam suddenly shakes as if an earthquake has hit Manhattan. The action has begun. In a panic, all the characters run out of the apartment blocks’ 35th floor party to the street level. They see a huge Godzilla like monster ravaging its way through Manhattan, flattening skyscrapers as it charges through the streets. This is followed by a few scenes of, I have to say, very realistic “World Trade Centre” style images of skyscraper dust shooting down narrow streets and engulfing all who stand in its way as the main characters take shelter in a shop, safe from the falling rubble. The whole party run for Brooklyn Bridge (the quickest means of escape from where they are on Manhatten Island), but are cut short in their escape by the monster flattening the bridge, where “the brother” falls to his death. Or so I think; the quivering handycam hindered me from seeing much that wasn’t big enough to cover 90% of the TV screen.

Now, the protagonist (the brother of “the brother”) gets a phone call from his girlfriend (we’ll call her that – as for all intents and purposes, she is) who is stuck in her apartment building, so he must go rescue her with two of his other girly friends and the fat idiot on the handycam. The Godzilla monster at this point is dropping little aliens that look like mini versions of the main aliens from Starship Troopers. They have massive jaws, are very fast, and the CGI is amazing… if only we saw more than 3 of them up close it would have been even more impressive. However, I digress. They flee through the streets and subways of New York, all the time with the fat oaf on the handycam spurting wholly inappropriate lines about how scary it would be if an alien popped out of the air conditioning duct. Which is the last thing you’d want to hear when you’re running for your life. They meet some little aliens, and one girl gets bitten, again the CGI is stunning, but her head explodes for no reason, we’re not given any explanation at all and the next second some National Guard troops are pointing the surviving cast towards “the girlfriends” apartment.

Eventually the Fellowship of the Handycam finds “the girlfriends” apartment building, and it’s leaning at 45º against the skyscraper next to it. I’m not sure that’s entirely possible, but this is a film, so we’ll let that slide. They then climb the stairs on the next building up to the 49th floor, and jump onto the roof of “the girlfriends” apartment. She’s alive, and they all manage to get back to ground level in one piece. On their travels they find out that the government are so scared of this Godzilla monster that they are going to airstrike, possibly nuke, Manhattan Island to get rid of these alien creatures at 06:00 that morning. They make it to the evacuation point just before 6am, and get on two separate choppers.

One chopper makes it out (we assume – although we never see it again), however the chopper with the handycam gets hit by the Godzilla monster and crash lands in Central Park. The idiot on the handycam gets eaten, great, no more retarded conversation at least. The last two survivors, the protagonist and his girlfriend, cower under a bridge in Central Park at which point an explosion happens and the bridge collapses. Then the credits role. What? No explanation as to what the monster is? Where it came from? What it’s doing there? If it was killed? If it escaped? What the little aliens it dropped were? Why did getting bit by the little aliens make peoples’ heads explode? No? Oh I’m sorry, we’re just idiot viewers who don’t deserve any explanations at all. This was worse than Lost for not answering anything at all! I’m just glad I didn’t fork out a fortune to see it at the cinema. No surprise here, this is getting a prestigious zero stars.