I watched Cloverfield

Yes, yes, spoiler alert if you didn't watch it and all that. Let me just get on to talking about it.

I finally saw it this past weekend. I was warned by Lucy that she had motion sickness after the end of it. Being the type of person who is generally immune to motion sickness I wasn't that worried, but about 20 minutes into the movie, even I was pretty happy that I had not eaten breakfast.

The worst part was, thanks to my wonky right eye that has exponentially worse eyesight compared to the left, I was also starting to get mild eyestrain that felt like someone was mildly tugging at my optic nerves. I had to close my eyes a couple of times and do a little massage over the eyelid to try and relieve the pressure.

Overall opinion. I liked it. It was a decent monster movie. They were true (for the most part) to the aesthetic that they wanted. I think I couldn't really join in on the backlash since I didn't pay attention much to the intial hype anyway. I thought they set out on doing what they wanted to do and did it. And it was pretty fun except for the feeling barfy with an eyeball about to fall out of an eye socket.

Truth be told I saw some of the monster design sketches that leaked out to the net...My first thought was "I hope that's not it," because I was still mildly hoping that the theory that it was about Cthulhu coming to earth heralding the coming of the Elder Gods was just so attractive.

Anyhow, I was mildly hoping it wasn't going to be just a monster movie for some reason, but I wasn't really disappointed. But things that did irk me:

The plot device of the guy going back for the girl. Stupid. No, really. Like try to give it some compelling back story, that he'd been in love with her "forever" and they'd been good friends forever, but quite honestly. No. Did not work for me. It would've made way more sense for me if they had been newlyweds or newly engaged or something. The idea of him going after a beautiful rich girl (living in flippin' Columbus Circle. Gag me with a spoon), was just so utterly annoying. And it just made no compelling sense for his other friends to follow him to their tragic deaths. All it did was make the main love interests very unattractive and you did not want to care for them. Annoying, young, prissy New Yorkers tarted up with a thin veneer of humanity because "omg~ he lurrrrrrrrrrrrrved her." Bitch, please. You know I just think it was bad writing really. This "she was my best friend, I loved her forever, and we finally slept together but now she's seeing some other guy?" thing could've been handled differently as well I suppose. But how it was done in this particular incarnation? Ugh. It wasn't enough to make me hate the movie, but there were definitely times I just wanted to punch everyone the main guy and the rich girl in the face.

Also, I was disappointed we stayed with one point of view like that. I was sort of hoping at the beginning when you had the two different videos, before I learned it was just the main guy's brother, that it would be a sort of "Where were you when the monster and his body lice attacked?" type of thing.

Really awesome? When the gang first runs into the army. That scene was amazing. In fact, I thought the confrontation scenes with the creature and the military were some stunning pieces of special effects.

Oh speaking of body lice. Yes, I buy that it's body lice. I think that's way more compelling than seeing the little things were the creatures babies. I mean come on. Do we ever *really* think about the implications of a monster creature attacking? It's a wild animal thing. It's nasty. It's not just walking around eating and breaking shit, there's gotta be some other consequences like, oh yea, it's got parasites, pathogens we've never dealt with before because we've never dealt with anything like this before.

Overall, I liked it, and it was fun. A new way of looking at the traditional monster flick.