Cloverfield (2008/Blu-ray/Paramount)
Picture:
B- Sound: B Extras: D Feature: D
Who cares
how much money it made! Even more of a
mess than Speed Racer, the condescending,
idiotic, gimmickry-loaded and borderline insulting J.J. Abrams’ produced Cloverfield is one of the worst films
of 2008 and it is debatable as to whether it is a film at all. Shot mostly on bad videotape, made bad on
purpose with so much shaking that you’d think anyone who handled a video camera
was an idiot or had major medical nerve troubles, this is one of the biggest
con jobs since the old 1970s cycle of Sunn Schick “Classics” and the
über-rip-off Blair Witch Project.
Of
course, there are even smart people who like this mess, as the link to this
review by our fellow writer shows:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/6975/Cloverfield+(Paramount+DVD–Video)
However,
others like this writer are not as amused.
First off, this garbage would have never
been made after 9/11 and shows some people will do anything for a buck. I hope this is not was Abrams has planned for
his Star Trek revival!
Director
Matt Reeves is actually more inept than the supposed amateurs here and the
mostly unknown cast can do nothing more than be a bad imitation of the same
surprised groups in Independence Day
(1996, reviewed elsewhere on this site) which was knowingly silly and populist
at times, but at least treated it audience with respect. This is the most pointlessly cynical giant
monster yarn we will ever see and I enjoyed the rumors it was a giant rabbit
attacking New York, but that was not quite the case. Then it is only 84 minutes, but that is like
four hours of white noise from an analog TV.
There was
much fuss about how all the budget went to visual effects, but they are as
cheap looking as the cheap cameras here.
So precalculated is this that you can hear the cash registers in the
background. In a few years, people will
realize how they were conned by this soulless mess and remember it as part of a
bad era in American living in general.
The 1080p
and sometimes 1080i and even less than 480-anything 1.78 X 1 image is a mess,
hurts the cause of film, High Definition video and being no better than the
standard DVD, gives Blu-ray a bad rap.
Michael Bonvillian, A.S.C., is the Director of Photography and was
needed here for what? To make sure this
looked as bad as possible throughout?
Not exactly what we would call demonstration quality.
The Dolby
TrueHD 5.1 mix is better than the Dolby Digital 5.1 here or on the DVD, but
only in very rare occurrences. Most of
the film is like bad monophonic or barely stereo sound, then the sound picks up
when the attacks happen. The problem is,
and the dirty secret is, this is nothing more than badly animated radio. That’s it!
By playing the sound and being too cheap to show anything of substance
(like the 1998 Godzilla!) this train wreck can feign “imagination” but is just
a very bad variant of what radio networks did with dramas in monophonic sound
in the 1930s!
You’d be
better off listening to Orson Welles as The Shadow, though this wants badly
to be another Welles’ classic, His radio version of H.G. Wells’ War
Of The Worlds. Compare this to
Spielberg’s recent film version of that literary classic and you can see just
how much worse and badly handled this is.
Just as well, the mix is not that great on its own sonic level and is
too self-impressed with itself.
Extras
are the same, except some are presented (try not to laugh) in High Definition,
but like everything else connected to this
stab-the-customer–in-the-back-and-grab-their-wallet affair, nothing is ever
even a fraction of as good as it pretends to be. Beware the Sequel(s) and skip this big time!
- Nicholas Sheffo
