That is correct!

What about Abrams? Don't you have a love/hate relationship with his works (aka Lost)?

I'll give this film an A+, yeah I know that's pretty high for a movie that has undergone so much adveristy, but I cannot give it anything less.

The whole idea of the movie being shot with a hand held at first had me a bit concerned, but worked out perfectly. While shaky at times, I think the idea of the first person view was fitting for this particular film. Had this been shot with normal cameras, the film wouldn't have been very good at all, and the ending would have been horrible. However, this film pulled off a strong ending in my opinion. Why? Because the narrator remained reliable and realistic, the whole time the film was shot by Hud in the middle of this catastrophe, so how realistic would it be for the film to even begin explaining stuff? I don't really see any way to explain the monster, without the movie losing it's reliability and honesty so to speak. Secondly, the ending was perfect because it kept the focus on what's important, and stayed consistent with the focus throughout the rest of the film. The movie wasn't about what the monster was, or how it functioned, etc. etc. The movie was about some unknown monster tearing apart Manhatten and how a group of people attempt to escape/survive. In the end, the monster's identity remains undisclosed, which prevents the movie's focus from changing.

Another reason why I enjoyed this movie, is because it was intense. It was an 'edge of your seat' kind of movie, and it was scary. The scenes with the military and the F16's was so impactful, and so significant to the story and that is one of the main reasons why I gave this film such a high rating.

Feel free to debate my opinion, as I'm sure many of you will.

like i said in the beginning of the thread.

everyone who seems to be highly disappointed in the movie are all going in, leaving, and wanting it to be a monster film, including the most vocal voices here, which this film, in many ways, was clearly not.

the movie couldn't get 2 shits about the monster.

u Legged freaks is a little too vague, if anything it reminded me of the facehuggers from Alien, or particularly the scene when Ripley and Newt are stuck in the room with them.

and you, keep outtings words where there are none.

i said you guys wanted a monster flick. i never said you guys wanted your typical monster flick.

i called cloverfield a movie that is not a monster flick.

now start reading and stop accusing others of not reading. because i believe me, along with everyone else who has been arguing with you have replied back and questioned you on your statements a few times now and you've changed your approach from going from opinion to claiming something is not possible to going back and saying that its just your opinion.

quite a bit of flip flopping and no .... its not just me sitting here saying it.

You DID want a monster movie!!! That's why you went and saw it!!!

Magnus, what exactly are you trying to say? Baba is right in that you are oscilating.

You seem upset that nobody can "refute" the "fact" that you didn't like the movie. I don't see why anybody would bother trying to do that, and I don't see anybody is. You've made some statements and people have put up their opinions.

Everything you say comes down to your opinion of monster movies or even thrillers in general. I don't know what kind of response you are looking for? There is no correct answer.

I really dont feel like hunting through the whole thread

but a simple

[img]I watch most monster movies without looking at the stor at all. But this movie tried to do something different to the genre and by actually having a story. But while it promised this, it did not really deliver.

And the film does have its moments. The monster looks really cool, and there is great comedic relief. But it's bad story and uninteresting charecters take too much away from it for it to be considered something great.[/img]

you keep comparing it to monster flicks. you keep calling it a monster flick. yes. it had a monster. yes, you are completely justified to want it to be a monster flick. thats how they marketed it. you take my statement of that as a criticism which its never been from the first moment.

but this isn't the first time when you keep comparing the film to how monster films should be or should have been done or what you'd like it to be. there is even a thread you've started on it.

have you been explicit about saying it? no. but come on..... how much more clearer will you make it.

so now you've gone from wanting a monster movie to 'if i wanted one, i'd watch the host' so therefore i wasn't looking for a monster movie and now to 'i didn't want a typical monster movie', which according to many and even insinuated by you, it wasn't.

the film had a monster in it. it was marketed as a monster movie.

but having seen it and considering how muc hthe monster plays a part mainly in the premise (and considering its actual screentime is only about 2 or 3 minutes), this film is less concerned with the monster and more concerned with the people and their reactions to such a sudden situation. to call this movie a monster movie is like calling star wars a movie about space.

The Host isn't a monster movie....

Might as well jump onto the pigpile:

MAGNUS YOU FUCKING IDIOTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I will probably never see this film.

stuff related to '40s serials seems to be what you like most, and this is a revolutionary film unlike anything ever made that would've been trashed in the '40s, so you'd probably hate it

Thinking about this movie makes me love it more.

you boys have forced me write an article about this for the site.

Wow, 9 pages already? Are Spiderman 3 and The New World feeling threatened?

At any rate, I believe Children of Men holds the record at 21 pages.

:smug:

I disagree. The fact that this film could do a lot to change Hollywood will keep it as an interesting dicussion for a while. Plus, it's only made $40 million up to this point; there's a lot of people who haven't seen this yet, even if a lot of people on this website already have.

Did The Blair Witch Project change Hollywood? It was much cheaper to make, opened with a huge weekend in '99 (with a considerably larger PTA), and had a total that's going to end up $20-30m higher than Cloverfield.

Blair Witch was only so successful because people thought it was real before it came out (at least, this is what people have told me; I wasn't old enough to follow it) and it coincided with the whole idea of "internet buzz" helping a film. Cloverfield obviously wasn't documenting real events, but the way they handled it was about 100 times more effective than if they shot it conventionally. Yeah, it didn't look as pretty, but it sure intrigued audiences, and shows that just spending a ton of money on beautiful production design doesn't mean box office success. The Golden Compass cost seven times more money to make than Cloverfield, yet Cloverfield will pass TGC in its second weekend (or at least come close).

Cloverfield shines a whole new light on using creativity to cut down on production costs, and, more obviously, a completely new way to advertise moviese. Show them something shocking, out of nowhere, and very unrevealing.

More impressive? When did I say that?

All I said was that Blair Witch and Cloverfield became successful films for extremely different reasons, even though they had the same general style and are the most comparable films to each other. Blair Witch Project was a success like nothing we've ever seen. It made more money than Cloverfield's gonna make despite a budget lower than the majority of documentaries...all I'm saying is that Cloverfield didn't have the whole people-thought-this-was-real factor on its side, and that's something that REALLY helped Blair Witch Project out, if I'm not mistaken. Nothing about Cloverfield being more successful, nothing about Blair Witch not being an unprecedented phenomenon, just an explanation of why Cloverfield is still a really, really huge success despite having a way worse money-to-budget ratio than Blair Witch. Because really, how many films are ever gonna make so much money after spending so little as Blair Witch did?

so, I got nauseous watching this. Didn't puke but came really close. surprised by that, so I guess the shaky cam thing does really affect people.

anyway, movei was entertaining. Wish they had developed the script a bit more. Having been in NYC during TWO major emergencies (9/11 & blackout), I know that is not how people react and talk to each other. The acting itself wasn't bad. just the freaking things they were saying. ugh!!

But the subway scene by itself was worth it. I was on the edge of my seat biting my nails.

B+

Yeah. As successful as Cloverfield is, it can never compare to the phenomenon that was The Blair Witch Project. I seem to recall that opening to like $30M when it went wide (and "wide" was 1,000 theaters). Of course, when the backlish/competition from The Sixth Sense hit, it nosedived, but whatever. 1999 was a crazy ass summer at the box office. We haven't had one like that since then.

whoa. with 22000 grades in on IMDB, this maintained its 8.1 avg. No film with awful WOM has had a grade this high this many reviews into its run. Today at school, I discovered that the majority of my friends loved it or really liked it. I think the "terrible WOM" this was supposedly getting is nonexistent.