There are lucky bastards, and then there are Harry Knowles and Jeff Wells, Both are movie bloggers with devoted readerships (Knowles for the fans, Wells for the industry know-it-alls), and both are influential enough to get a sneak peek at Cloverfield and become the first guys anywhere to write about it. If you thought the excitement for this movie was already at a frenzy, just wait: both these guys went nuts for it.
"Cloverfield is worth the obsession," writes the always-hyperbolic Knowles. "This is a towering movie. A complete reinvention of the disaster movie, the giant monster movie and even the love story."
Wells, known to hate anything and everything, is more reserved but heavy on the metaphors. "Cloverfield is a monster film unlike any other -- a complete original, but no less of a rock' em-sock 'em for that. It's amazing in that it's so short (by my watch about 74 minutes without credits), and yet so fierce. [...] This movie is REM madness. It is Guillermo del Toro on a tab of brown acid with a little crack thrown in."
I know what you're thinking-- what about the monster?? Weirdly, neither guy is willing to take the bait. The best Knowles gives us is a description of what it is not: "It’s not a fucking upright walking whale. It doesn’t look like any iteration of Godzilla that we’ve ever seen. It is enormous. And even though I’ve seen it… I am hard-pressed to come up with a comparative creation." Wells, again, leans back on questionable metaphors for his description: "He's a nightmare that "means" nothing but says everything. He's a vision out of a Grimm Brothers fable, but one written by a deranged Matt Damon or Heath Ledger while locked in a 19th Century mental ward. He's a fiend that a heroin addict might see in his sleep during his first night in rehab." I have no idea what that means, but it sure sounds terrifying.
Check out each of their reviews for yourself, and feel the anticipation within you grow. Is someone inevitably going to come along and burst our bubble and say Cloverfield is like The Blair Witch Project but less scary? Probably. But right now we're in that great phase where the excitement seems unstoppable, and even the first professional guys to see it can't get enough. Now we know this whole thing wasn't a colossal tease, that we haven't been unwrapping box after box to reveal something utterly disappointing. Cloverfield is going to be the real deal, whatever that turns out to mean.
