I remember back in November 1997, back when I was a lad no more than 13, I paid my whopping 4 bucks for a matinee showing of Starship Troopers, skipped by the concession stand (an undying trend of mine), and took my seat at the now-destroyed Century 11 in Reno, Nevada. The lights went down, and a mysterious trailer began that featured a goofy old man fishing off of a New York City dock. There was a sudden rattle, then a scream, then a giant head coming at the dock. GODZILLA! Sweet! Six months went by, and one of the most disappointing summer movies ever unleashed itself on movie screens around the world. I was loving almost every movie back around 1998 but I still managed to see the suck factor that was Godzilla.

And so we’ve been waiting for another monster-themed modern-day New York City movie ever since but haven’t really had one to wet our appetites. King Kong hit similiar territory at the end, but I feel that didn’t really count in the scheme of things. I wanted good old fashioned 90 minutes of big creature destruction. Well, it took ten years for a movie to get the sour taste of Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla out of my mouth, but a little 25-million-dollar movie named Cloverfield finally did it.

I was always intrigued by this movie, stemming all the way back to that teaser trailer that premiered on Transformers, but I felt that there would be no way that this movie would live up to the hype. I walked in interested about what this movie had in store, but ultimately a lack of enthusiasm for what was about to happen on-screen. While the movie goes on a couple minutes too long in the end, and some questionable, over-used effects start to lessen the tension and scares in the final half-hour, I was pretty impressed with this movie, all the way down to the unique narrative device that emcompasses the film from beginning to end. I thought it would be too clever for its own good, but it worked.

The most effective stretch of the movie is the beginning, before any of the destruction goes down. It helps that we know something bad is going to happen. I love getting the backstory of our two main characters from taped-over footage we mostly in the beginning and the end, and then sporadically throughout. It doesn’t work perfectly, as it’s a little too neat to truly buy, but I understand what the filmmakers are trying to do, and they make good use of the clever idea.

The actors, none of whom I’ve seen before, really make the movie more chilling because there’s no who’s who of familiar faces here. Having all of these people be newcomers make the experience a lot more visceral, because there’s no predicting who may live or die. The attractive protagonist Michael Stahl-David, who plays Rob, probably comes off the best, and Lizzy Caplan, playing a friend named Marlena who has something horrifying happen to her, is memorable.

For a film that promotes itself as a literal home video, Cloverfield does disappoint a little bit in the quality of the special effects. If the movie were just played as a straight film, without the gimmick, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me as much, but because everything in the movie is supposed to be taken for complete reality, some of the lackluster special effects start to distract after awhile. Some of the effects are awesome, like the initial explosion in New York City, and the helicopter spinning out of control in the end. But some shots of the actual monster look completely fake, and all the CGI with the little spiders look lame. At the end of the day, the movie just shows far too much. We don’t need a ten-second close-up of the monster.  The filmmakers should’ve kept everything a little bit more secretive and hidden to make the events scarier. As it is, the film just isn’t all that frightening; certainly a lot less than an end-of-the-world horror movie like 28 Days Later.

Cloverfield is a solid film, probably one of the best ever released in January, and it’s a rare film that actually lives up to the hype it’s been given. It’s not something I’ll need to see again anytime soon, but it’s a genuinely original idea that executed much better than anticipated. The directing job by Matt Reeves is terrific, and the acting is above average for a film like this. It’s definitely a film for the age it’s in and won’t have a lot of staying power in the coming years, but for now, it’s a thriller worth seeing.