
The plot seems to be your standard giant monster trashes a city (New York, natch), with the twist being the Blair Witch-style filming technique, as a group of friends document the disaster on their camcorders...
Review: Unlike the teaser (which was an elongated scene), the trailer is a more traditional series of clips, but it's now clear the whole movie will be presented as home-video footage -- helping to sell the reality of the situation...
Cloverfield seems to be Godzilla, with a 28 Days Later digital grittiness and Blair Witch Project sensibility. His involvement with Lost means J.J Abrams certainly knows a thing or two about building hype, and keeping stuff elusive. Considering Cloverfield is released quite soon (18 Jan 08, in the US / 1 Feb 08 in the UK), the production has been impressively water-tight when it comes to spoilers.
Prediction: There's no doubt that the marketing campaign has built enough expectation and interest to mean a massive opening weekend. Abrams himself has a following from the hordes of Alias and Lost fans -- while everyone loves a big monster action movie spectacle, don't they?
But it's the realism delivered by filming everything on hand-held cameras that will be Cloverfield's trump card. That style caused a phenomenon with Blair Witch in 1999 and, although Cloverfield s reality is less blurred than that seminal horror, audiences love the sense of realism camcorders bring to unreal events.
The first blockbuster of 2008 is upon us...
Hi-Res (20 MB)
HD 480P (31 MB)
HD 720P (104 MB)
HD 1080P (161 MB)