Cloverfield is a waste of time

From the guys that brought you Lost comes the new, hit movie "Cloverfield". Which, I'm sorry to say, is a really really bad movie.

It's a retread of the terrible monster attacks New York City, but told from the perspective of the most annoying people in the city.

Cloverfield suffers from all the things a movie can suffer from. It offers a putrid potpourri of bad casting, bad acting, bad script, bad direction, and pointedly abysmal camera-work. It's not scary, haunting, or disturbing and since the main characters are all pretty awful, I was never all that sad to see them go.

I generally conceive of movies as stories told through acting and camera-work. The general framework of a story is something like: protagonist is introduced, a problem is discovered, the problem is examined, and finally the problem is resolved. I think that JJ Abrams (the producer of this movie -- and also Lost) has realized that the hardest part of story-telling is those last two parts.

The easiest part is the beginning bit. Because we movie goers are a bunch of curious monkeys. We see just a little of something or get a hint of motivation here or there and we're hooked. We want to know what happens, how it ends up. But when you've posited a giant octopus-monster in the middle of Manhattan, it's kinda hard to come up with legitimate explanations that will satisfy the audience. So instead of trying to explain anything, just keep bringing up new and weirder questions. Bring up so many questions that the original questions are forgotten or seem insignificant.

Like Lost before it, Cloverfield is an extension of this methodology. It's a monster movie with no real monster, with no development and no resolution. There's no story, just teaser and nauseating camera-work.

A brief synopsis...