Cloverfield

Brilliant movie-making. It surpassed my expectations, lived-up to the hype and (at under 90 minutes) understood that even the Godzilla-like destruction of all that makes us feel secure (perhaps complacent) can be overdone and take too long. How well was the movie made? I guess the proof is found in the fact that it mattered to me how each character reached their story's end. This is no mean feat because the Director seemed to have set them up as irritating brats, cardboad cut-out charcters, in the first twenty minutes. So ... a film about accepting responsibility, the loss of innocence, courage, mortality, environmental damage, the folly of isolation, belonging, family, love, the insignificance of any one of us; ach, heaps of serious stuff (but I already read like a pompous oaf so that'll be more than enough). All of the aforementioned driven into our sub-conscious by a two hundred foot tall lizard with creepy-crawly wee parasites. It will be on everyone's list of films of the year. Folk will be watching it 50 years from now. A true classic of (post)modern cinema. Who would have thought it?