If you’re going to see Cloverfield this week, do yourself a favor. Sit on a sit and spin with your digital camera, scream a lot as you go around and around in circles, then zoom in really tight on a wall and keep yelling over and over again “Are you okay?” If you want to really enhance the effect, light some toy soldiers and model buildings on fire and put a gray sweater on your dog. When you’re done with that, pop the SD card into your computer, play it back in QuickTime Player, and enjoy. You just made Cloverfield.

After seeing the very first teaser trailer, the words “can’t miss” were emblazened into my brain. There was no way this movie could be bad. If everything else failed, the concept alone could salvage it. A monster movie shot from the first-person point of view couldn’t be bad. We’d feel the terror of the people involved. We’d feel fear. We’d mourn the loss of our city.

In the end?

Nothing.

Understand, it wasn’t that I didn’t get it. I knew what to expect. Handheld cam monster movie in NYC. Hell, it isn’t rocket science, so anyone who criticizes you for not liking the movie by telling you that you didn’t get it probably is so wrapped up in what the movie meant they didn’t catch how God awful it was and how horribly it failed. Spoilers to follow. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

1. The characters are awful. They’re not likeable, relatable, and so on. I didn’t care about them. Seeing most of them die within 20 minutes of the movie did nothing for me. I didn’t even feel bad for them.

2. The movie, overall, is stupid. In one scene, Rob, the guy who should’ve left for Japan one day earlier, makes his way into the cockeyed building his love interest lives in and fines her laying on the floor with a piece of rebar poking through her chest. He and the other two people left from the party (including Hud, the camera man) pull her off the rebar and she proceeds to walk out of the building and later runs from the monster on foot. RUNS. With a hole in her chest from a piece of rebar. Not even remotely believable.

And of course, after they run into the subway initially to avoid a monster attack (before the above scene), they decide that in the damn dark they’re going to trudge from Spring Street to 59th street (a walk of roughly 4 miles) through the tunnels of the subway during an alien attack. Hey. What could go wrong? Dark tunnels during an alien attack? Sounds perfectly safe to me!

Are they fucking retarded?

Yes.

3. The military begins evacuating the city and our party meets with the military airlift out of the city. For an inexplicable reason, Lilly makes it onto one chopper and is lifted out. Rob, Beth, and Hud don’t make it onto that helicopter and are put onto a second helicopter. The jackass flying the helicopter doesn’t fly high enough causing it to be within swatting range of the alien. Need I say what happens next? No. You already know.

4. So the helicopter hits the ground with lots of “are you okay?” shit. “Are you okay?” should’ve been the tagline of the movie because it’s all you hear for over an hour. “Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay?” Hud (the camera tool) drags Rob out with Beth’s help. The monster appears behind Hud, looks him dead in the eye, and chews him up and spits him out leaving him dead on the floor. Rob and Beth grab the camera and run to hide. Rob gives his final summation of what happened, Beth and him clutch, the bombing destruction of NYC begins and after an orange flash, a bit of footage from prior use of the camera with Rob and Beth during happier times at Coney Island. Then the credit roll.

5. The monster shots are okay, but not terribly interesting. Expected more. The military fighting the monster on the street was dumb but sounded great. The idea that the military would go after this creature that’s about 40-50 stories tall with ground troops had me scratching my head. That’s not even remotely believable.

In the end, Cloverfield is a movie stuck more on the concept than on the movie. We get it. Shaky cam average person footage. That’s the point. I just expected better. Blair Witch was much scarier and felt much more desperate and urgent and there never was one second worth of footage of any “Witch” in the entire movie. The terror was much more palpable, the fear more dense, and the movie itself was light years ahead. Oh yeah, and it probably cost exponentially less to produce. Imagine that.

There’s one easy thing they could’ve done to make Cloverfield infinitely better but they were so full of the concept, they probably never even thought of it…

They supposedly found Rob’s camera in the area formerly known as Central Park. What if they also found other cameras, or spliced in various footage from other “witnesses”? Surely an event like this would’ve been heavily covered by cell phone cameras, video cameras, still cameras… What if instead of presenting us with Rob’s camera, they presented us with a collage / collection of footage collected by the Department of Defense? More angles, more explanation, and more depth.

Instead, JJ Abrams is such a self-absorbed douche that he couldn’t see past the “concept” to make a good movie. Cloverfield was a massive disappointment. It’s the best example of a director and production team too caught up in their gimmick to make a good movie. The movie falls flat on its face in many respects. The characters are God-awful. The monster destruction stuff is unsatisfying, and the “stuff” that happens is implausible and ridiculous.

In other words, a “can’t miss” movie fails in epic fashion to deliver the goods.