Cloverfield

As a thrill ride, this movie is pretty much a complete success, I guess. Just cuz I'm me, I could quibble about all sorts of things like how they could have had this amazing shot of the monster walking through the city when the characters had pointlessly made their way back into the city and to the top of the building Rob's gf was dying in. That at least would've made their little trek worth it; Beth's impaled-yet-miraculously-spry body on the floor of her apartment did not.

I can practically hear the director or screenwriter or whoever on the commentary track of the DVD saying something like "You go in thinking you're going to watch some big monster movie, but really we wanted to make a movie about love and redemption," and he'll be completely wrong. Nobody watching this movie cared at all about any of the characters; most of the theater groaned/laughed when Beth opened her eyes and she and Rob had their "Of course I came back for you" moment (what the hell happened to that Justin guy, by the way? Did the sheer force of Rob's stunted-growthed love overtake the fabric of the movie's reality and whisk Justin out of existence? Or did he fall out of the building and nobody cared because Beth only took him to the party to make Rob jealous and they're both total narcissists?), so despite all the filmmakers' machinations to try to foreground the 'human' story, ultimately we probably care less about the characters than we do in most traditionally filmed monster flicks. Which, I guess, just goes to show that making people care about characters isn't accomplished by the style of photography, but by the actual writing of the movie.

Also, the giant lice things were dumb. There's already a ginormous monster trashing the city. If you can't get enough horror or spectacle or suspense or whatever out of that then you're not even a good enough writer to be making a monster movie. Congratulations.