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What's with the overuse of the name Robert Hawkins lately? After watching Jericho, it was hard for me to separate the name and allow it to be used as the protagonist of Cloverfield, but I got over it. Cloverfield stars a bunch of lesser-known twenty-something actors as friends and acquaintances at a party who all get caught in Manhattan at the wrong time - when a giant monster attacks the city. Since this movie has been around for a few months now, I'm going to post spoilers all throughout, so don't say I didn't warn you.

There was so much buzz around this movie that I really wanted to see it when it came out, but we were busy moving and Ric wasn't too excited about the handheld camera experience in the theater, so we waited and Netflixed it. The camera motions didn't bother me, but Ric was feeling a little tired out by the movie's end. I think the movie really did have an interesting concept with the camera work. It put us in the characters' situation with them, and we experienced it as they did. It was also a nice touch because of the moments where Hud the camera man paused the tape and small cuts of the previous footage on the tape revealed details of the relationship between Robert and Jenn.

The movie was definitely better than I thought it would be because of details like that. Sure, it had some cliches, including the idea of quarantining/bombing an island (see 28 Weeks Later, I Am Legend, etc.), the image of a damaged Statue of Liberty (Planet of the Apes), using a dark subway to escape danger (28 Weeks Later), and baby monsters (and subsequently, exploding humans: Alien trilogy). But the ways those were used were all effective, and the effects used with those ideas made it seem very real (except for the baby monsters, who seemed too dangerous to be beaten by three people and a pipe). Every moment still continued to be surprising and filled with tension.

As for the lesser-known casting, unfortunately Hud is also in the mediocre tv show Carpoolers, which I watched for a while in the hopes that it would get funnier. TJ Miller (Hud) plays a guy named Marmaduke, who is one of the stupidest individuals ever. I could only think of Marmaduke through the whole movie, so that kind of killed it for me.

Overall, I think Cloverfield started out a bit slow but got a lot better as it went. In fact, thinking about it now, I'm convinced that I like monster movies so much more than horror movies. And yes, I would group in zombie movies with monster movies. Those such as the first half of I Am Legend, 28 Weeks Later (minus the editing) and The Host all have some really creative aspects to them, whereas all horror movies seem to be pretty much the same. Somehow, it seems that in the monster movies, the characters are all still the focal point, and the monsters are only there to make the characters grow. I've been really interested by the ideas behind these types of movies lately. It will be interesting to see what happens to the genre over the next few years.