As most of you know, I had a chance to see Cloverfield at a special screening earlier this week (you can read and see my review here), and I ended up liking it a lot. Last night, I went to see it again at a midnight showing at the Mann’s Chinese theater in Hollywood. I was expecting to have even more fun with it the second time around… but as it turns out, the opposite happened.
Viewing Cloverfield the second time, the flaws of the film jumped out at me much more than they did the first time around:
1) For some reason, the shaky handheld camera was a LOT more annoying this time… which is strange because it didn’t really bother me all that much the first time.
2) Some of the dialog is just atrocious. I think I let that slide by the first time because… really… most of us weren’t all that interested in the dialog anyway, we were all just waiting for the next peek at the monster. This time, I had already seen the movie and paid more attention to the dialog. Ouch… wish I hadn’t done that.
3) I said in my first review that the monster was nothing ground breaking… and this time it seemed even more bland to me
4) This time I really noticed how LITTLE the monster is actually in the movie. I figure the monster probably has about 5 minutes of screen time in total. This was highlighted by one of the guys walking out of the theater complaining to his friends “the poster and commercials made me think this was a fuckin monster movie. That wasn’t a monster movie, that was a fuckin love story”. And he was right.
Now here’s the thing. I still think everyone should see this ONCE. The novelty of the film glosses over most of these flaws on your first viewing… just don’t ruin it for yourself by seeing it twice, because I’m pretty sure you won’t like it as much the second time around.
