Cloverfield (2008)

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General		Extras
Category	Horror	Audio Commentary-Director Matt Reeves Seamless Branching-Making of and Viral Marketing Easter Egg
Rating
Year Of Production	2008
Running Time	81:12
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Matt Reeves
Studio Distributor	Bad Robot Paramount Home Entertainment	Starring	Lizzy Caplan Jessica Lucas T.J. Miller Michael Stahl-David Mike Vogel Odette Yustman Anjul Nigam
Case	Amaray-Opaque
RPI	?	Music	None Given

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) English Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.78:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English English for the Hearing Impaired Danish Norwegian Finnish English Audio Commentary Swedish	Smoking	No
		Annoying Product Placement	Yes, excessively
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project. There's little doubt that is how Cloverfield was sold to the production studio and it certainly sums up the final product. 'It' producer JJ Abrams together with his Felicity co-creator Matt Reeves and Lost co-producer Drew Goddard created Cloverfield as a viral marketing phenomenon as well as a great-big monster movie. The final product works well on both levels, subtly pulling in the mountains of viral marketing into the Godzilla-wannabe heart of the movie.

    Cloverfield is presented as a first person account of an attack on Manhattan by an unnamed, big building crushing, monster and its little people-eating babies that has been plucked from the archives of the US Department of Defence. "Main Dude" Rob (Michael Stahl-David) is about to move to Japan for work. His best friend, the somewhat appropriately named "Hud" (TJ Miller), is filming Rob's going away party, which has been organised by his brother (Mike Vogel) and his brother's girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas). Mike has an tiff with his would-be girlfriend Beth (OdetteYustman) at the party, which spoils his evening a little. Not long after, the lights are out and ground is shaking from a monster that has descended upon the city. That spoils Mike's evening a little more. With a handful of friends and relatives in tow, Mike decides to head across Manhattan to try and rescue Beth as the monster attacks. As well as avoiding the monster itself, the gang need to dodge the masses of army troopers who are trying to clear evacuate the city. Hud keeps the camera rolling along the way to capture the story.

    For the most part Coverfield is a success and the key to its success is the balance it strikes in delivering to its audience. The opening third of the movie is choppy melodrama, which cuts out just before it gets to the point of being boring. The rest of the movie is pretty much non-stop action, which manages the balancing act of anticipation (running in the dark) and payoff (seeing the monsters) quite well. The film knows that the audience is only there to see the monster, but engineers a disposable, yet satisfying-enough, melodrama to keep up the level of anticipation up for the duration of the 70-odd minute running time (the 10 minutes of credits don't count!). The film ultimately delivers enough to keep audiences content, but viewers are guaranteed to leave hungry for more of the monster.

    The virtually unknown cast do a decent job in their roles. The acting is far from top shelf, but is plenty believable to move along a panic-driven creature feature. The effects are solid without being breathtaking (which is arguably a downside to the hand-held camera style of the film).

    Cloverfield is worthwhile popcorn action flick, but will leave a lot of viewers hungry for more than it delivers.

Video

    The movie is presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio and is 16x9 enhanced.

    The video looks as intended, given that it is intended to look like it was shot on video (which it was, albeit high-end digital equipment). The focus shifts erratically throughout the film, dark scenes become grainy (particularly when there is a lot of movement), low level noise is often noticeable. Arguably, the movie looks better on DVD than it did on the big screen since the small screen better matches to the digital video resolution the film was shot in, whereas theatrically this camcorder resolution made the film look very low resolution and a bit blurry.

    The colours occasionally look crushed and off-balance and there is a bit of colour banding in dark scenes, as you would expect from a home video camera, but the colours tend to look quite good when they need to.

    Pixelation and other video artefacts have been inserted to give a shot on video look to the movie, but there is no sign of unintentional compression artefacts. No film artefacts are visible at any point (unsurprising since it seems unlikely that there was any actual film scanning done in the production of the video).

    English subtitles (both plain and for the hearing impaired) are present for the feature. From the portion I sampled, they appear to be accurate and well timed.

    The film appears entirely on one layer of this dual layer disc.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    A single English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448 Kbps) audio track is present for the film.

    The core dialogue is clear and presented at a good level in the mix. On occasion characters wander away and, intentionally, become a little hard to hear and many of the yells and screams in the dialogue have been deliberately distorted to make the film sound more like something captured on home video.

    Keeping with the documentary feel, there is no score for the film. The only music appears in the background to the early party scenes and has been deliberately muffled to keep with the home video feel.

    Hud appears to have been walking around with an unusual microphone on his camera, since it seems to have done a great job picking up all the environmental effects in stunning surround sound (not to mention the deep bass it has picked up!). A lot of the effects are muffled in such a way as to keep up the camcorder-microphone style, but the sound field produced is top shelf Hollywood stuff. The subwoofer gets a brilliant and relatively diverse workout.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    This particular review is for the single disc edition of the movie, which is the same as the first disc of the 2 disc collector's edition that is also available.

Audio Commentary with Director Matt Reeves

    A fairly chatty and quite technical commentary from the movie's director. Fans might be hoping for a bit more mythology than the track offers, but what is on offer is fairly interesting nonetheless.

Cloverfield Supplemental Files Seamless Branching

    A seamless branching featurette that allows users to jump to small featurettes on the making of the film or videos from the film's viral marketing campaign (the spoof ad for fake Japanese ice drink "Slusho" is hilarious). Many of these little videos can also be found as Easter Eggs on the disc.

Easter Eggs

    There are several Easter Eggs on this disc. To find them: (SPOILER ALERT: highlight with mouse to read)

• Leave the "13-16" chapter selection page open for a couple of minutes and a new menu, titled "17", will appear from which several bonus videos can be viewed.

    This particular review is for the Region 4 single disc edition of the movie, which is the same as the first disc of the 2 disc collector's edition that is also available. The Region 1 edition of the movie appears to be only available in the 2-disc configuration, which is identical to the Region 4 2 disc edition. The 2-disc edition includes the following extra features:

• The Making of Cloverfield
• Cloverfield Visual Effects
• I Saw It! It's Alive! It's Huge! Featurette
• Deleted Scenes and Extended Scenes with Optional Commentary
• 2 Alternate Endings with Optional Commentary
• More Easter Eggs

    Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project, which makes for an entertaining popcorn flick.

    The video looks as intended by the filmmakers, which itself looks like it was shot on a home camcorder. It certainly looks good when it wants to. The audio is similarly styled to sound as though it was captured by a camcorder, albeit one that can pick up some first rate surround sound.

    The extras on this single disc edition are relatively limited, but sure to please fans of the movie's marketing campaign.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall