It’s a lion! No, it’s a DVD review

I meant to link to this yesterday, but you definitely want to check out my review of the Cloverfield DVD over on CT. And if you need a refresher on the movie’s multi-layered theatrical marketing campaign you can read my MMM column on that here.

Let’s not worry too much about the actual review of Cloverfield as a movie. The flick either works for you or it doesn’t and it works for me. I loved it in the theater and thought it was a great thrill ride that was a lot of fun, defied a number of established film conventions and was just a very, very good adventure movie. Additionally I thought it was an interesting document of trying something new with storytelling that, I’ll admit, might not be completely original but was certainly well executed and a nice spin on the “we are the camera” notion.

I’m hard pressed to decide whether the movie works better, as well or worse on the small screen than it did on the big one. You certainly lose some of the scale of the movie, but considering it’s supposed to be told from the perspective of someone’s digital camcorder that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The movie was always meant to be intimate so I don’t think the down-scaling really hurts it so much as it provides a different perspective on the story. The only thing that’s lost, really, is the increased impact of the events of the movie that the big movie screen brings with it, but that’s something that’s true of all movies and not just this one.