No Zytrons In Range

So I just watched the trailer for James Cameron’s Avatar.

View it at IMDB– Oh wait, there’s an annoying long ad you have to view before the trailer. Try viewing it at Apple– Oh wait it requires QuickTime. Well, let’s try viewing it at YouTube– Hey look, it just starts playing without any bullshit. Attention Internet company big-wigs: this is why people like Google!

So anyway, according to the trailer, a bunch of space marines with headless robots land on this planet. They volunteer one of their guys to transfer his brain into the body of one of the natives, who are blue elf creatures named the “Na’vi” which is obviously a Native American analogue. They have little tails. He’s released to live among the blue elf dudes, possibly to spy on them, and over a period of time he comes to appreciate their culture more than his own. He also meets some blue elf chick with a bow. When the space marines start to attack the blue elfs, he joins the elf side and leads them in battle with the marines.

So it’s Dances with Wolves.

Separated at birth?

Oh, but also the blue elfs train giant cats and ride dragons, apparently. That would be cool, if they didn’t look like blue elfs.

One of my buddies brought up that having the aliens in your movie be, basically, Native American elfs is pretty goddamned uncreative. Especially since this movie has a budget of over $300 million. Obviously none of that money went into hiring somebody who can come up with a creative and original alien race– hell the guys working for Lucas came up with like a dozen more creative and original alien races in the cantina scene alone! Seriously.

My original theory was that, due to the dragon riding and giant cat taming, the aliens in this movie were just way to obviously bad ass compared to the space marines, and so the space marines lost any sense of threat. So Cameron redesigned them to be elfs, and added cute little tails, to offset the bad ass-ness. (Note: this is also probably why he would add headless robots to the marines, so they kick more ass.) Good theory, but probably not true.

My second theory is that someone involved with this movie thought to themselves, “we need the audience to make an emotional connection with the Na’vi… I don’t think people will make a connection to something that doesn’t look or act human.” To that, a brief rebuttal:

Think about it.

Oh, and when we have guys in a movie riding dragons? Please make the dragons bigger than that. It just doesn’t satisfy the “wait a minute, this looks totally wrong” test if you have a human-sized guy riding a dragon with a wingspan of maybe 15 feet. Let’s see some dragons on film that are actually big enough to carry people around, not these wimpy ones.

The following two bulletpoints are really going to shock people who know me:

• I watched G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra last night
• I thought it was actually an ok movie

So here are some comments.

Rating:

G.I. Joe is rated PG-13 by the lovable, huggable, MPAA. Here’s an short list of things you can show in a PG-13 movie, apparently:

• Decapitation
• Decapitation via head explosion
• Woman getting pierced all the way through her torso, all the way through the tablet PC she was holding by a sword (oh, and the tablet was a Panasonic Toughbook model, so you know it was a forceful blow)
• Man falling through high-voltage lines and being burned to dust

Of course, in all of those scenes, there’s no blood because kids are too stupid to realize violence is happening when there’s no blood, right? Gee, the MPAA totally fucking up a movie rating? Unthinkable!

Product Placement:

I’m not some slick Madison Avenue advertising dude, so maybe I’m way off-base here when I say that I would assume product placement is more effective when the good guys are using the product. Although, I’m sure my new-found knowledge that psychotic brain-washing mad scientist Dr. Mindbender uses Norton Internet Security on his torture computer will influence my purchasing decision next time I need anti-virus.

Cisco gets off easy by having product placement for a technology (holographic tele-presence) that’s used by both the good and bad guys in the movie, although the product is far too useful and creative (and easy-to-use) to actually come out of stodgy Cisco.

Hummer’s use by the bad guys, in a car chase that involves billions of dollars of damage and dozens, if not hundreds, of fatalities– maybe that was an environmental message?

Sci-Fi:

Surprisingly, the sci-fi element of the movie isn’t completely and utterly ludicrous. The tele-presence system mentioned above is a safe prediction for the next twenty years. Some guy already build a prototype of the stealth suit.

There are some problems, though. Nano-bots, really? That’s waaay out-there considering the stuff seen in the rest of the movie. They could have used something more believable, like a portable EMP or Fallout 3-esque mini-nuke. And they never explain why you need a particle accelerator to “weaponize” nano-bots.

Ok, Star Trek pretty much rocked. I have to say this first, because the way my brain works, I always focus on the negatives first and forget about the positives. So here’s the negatives:

• The camera work was a little problematic at times. It’s like they used some special lens to emphasize lens flares in some attempt at “realism.” There are scenes with huge lens flare rectangles right above the actor’s faces. Also, there were a couple fight scenes where the cuts were so quick you couldn’t tell what was happening in the fight. Editors: we know quick cuts indicate action, but if you make to too quick nobody can tell what the hell is going on!
• While they did a pretty good job of following the Star Trek canon, I’m pretty sure that the Federation didn’t build the Enterprise in the middle of a corn field in Iowa. That was just weird. (Also, what were those super-tall Iowan buildings? Was that a future-city, or was it just the biggest grain elevator ever?) Oh and the Enterprise is at least twice the size of the old one… the original had room for maybe 2-3 shuttles in its landing bay, this new one has like 16. I guess this movie si a “reset’ so it’s not that big a deal. They also changed Star Trek’s warp drive to work more like Battlestar Galactica’s jump drive.
• That scene you saw in the preview where the classic car is racing along the Iowan freeway, then falls off a cliff while Kirk holds on for dear life? That actually has nothing to do with the plot. At all. Not even slightly. It is, believe it or not, part of a product placement for Nokia.
• Apparently all Federation ships now include vast engineering areas that resemble, more than anything, cheese processing plants. I’m actually ok with this, given the larger size of the Enterprise it almost makes sense– except for one small point: since there are no computers or really controls of any type (just pipes and tanks), Scotty’s engineering shots just consist of him running alongside pipes.
• Just say no to cute little comic relief sidekick alien characters. They suck. There’s one in this movie, accompanying Scotty. Just try to pretend it doesn’t exist.

That all said, the movie is vastly more entertaining than I expected it to be. Chris Pine did a great job of playing Kirk, without copying William Shatner’s un-copy-able Kirk. Zachary Quinto, as well, made an excellent Spock, and was much better than I expected. (I guess the crappiness of Heroes was firmly rooted in the script, not in the acting.)

All of the classic bridge characters are there, and all of them have their particular quirks/talents re-inforced: Chekov’s accent, Sulu’s fencing, that weird antenna thing in Uhuru’s ear, Scotty and McCoy’s classic lines. Captain Pike is there, playing the same role as Kirk’s mentor. Even the Kobayashi Maru test is present, and Kirk’s “cheating” is shown in a particularly comical way.

In fact, I was surprised at the amount of humor in the film. Even the villain is given a humorous line at one point, that made the whole theater laugh. It’s really at the level of, say, Star Trek IV, almost sliding into the comedy genre.

My recommendation: Watch it.

Jumper

It’s really hard to like this movie. It’s not that it’s not well-made or interesting; it’s that the “heroes” of this movie are such complete and total jackasses. Who, in fact, almost certainly cause more death and destruction than the “bad guys.” Including at least three out-right murders, one of them cold-blooded.

The story follows Anakin Skywalker- er, David Rice- as he unnecessarily narrates how he discovered his ability to teleport. Apparently, a tiny fraction of people are born with the ability to teleport themselves and objects they’re touching (up to a certain size) anywhere in the world instantly. At least if they come from broken homes, all the jumpers seem to have. Naturally, Anakin uses his gifts to rob banks, go on constant trips to tropical vacation spots, and ignore people who he could potentially save if he wasn’t such a self-absorbed jackass.

Samuel L Jackson plays Roland, an NSA agent who is also in a secret society of “Paladins” who hunt jumpers and also the most likeable character in the movie. After investigating one of Anakin’s bank robberies, Roland manages to track him down and hit him with an industrial-strength taser, which inhibits his ability to jump. Unless it’s important to the plot. Unfortunately for us, Anakin manages to escape, thus making the movie longer than half an hour.

Now knowing that he’s being pursued by the secret society, Anakin decides to lay low by going back to his home-town and the only people in the entire world who can positively ID him. Brilliant thinking there, buddy. Meeting up with his ex-girlfriend, Millie, he takes her to Rome. The conventional, airliner, way. Apparently he pays for the trip using a huge wad of cash in his backpack, and buys the tickets the day of the flight, which proves the TSA is as effective in the movie world is about the same as the real world.

In Rome, Anakin encounters another jumper, Griffin, who proceeds to murder several government agents before explaining to Anakin that the paladins have been hunting jumpers for thousands of years. How hunting down a person who can teleport anywhere on Earth instantly, and can only be stopped by tasers, was accomplished long before satellite communications was invented is not explained.

When Anakin’s carelessness leads the paladins to Griffin’s hideout, and they subsequently kidnap Millie, he must find a way to get her back and prevent Griffin from setting off a bomb… blah, blah, blah it’s really not that interesting.

But enough of the plot and plot holes. The movie is well-produced, has good special effects (especially during the world-spanning fights sequences), and the acting is passable. If you can get past the fact that every single character in it is a complete asshole, and the ending that is nothing but 5 minutes of setup for the sequel, give this one a rent. But you’re not missing much if you don’t.

Posted from a new iPhone. I’m so ashamed.

Ok, the iPhone is a really slick piece of technology. It also requires iTunes for all of its features to work. If you want an analogy, this is kind of like taking the precision steering of a formula one racer and installing it into a 5-ton garbage truck.

iTunes sucks.

iTunes sucks a lot.

I’ve spent the last 2 and a half hours on the phone with Apple, trying to fix this:

And this:

After a few long exercises in time-wasting* and lots of hold time, we finally managed to solve the first problem, hopefully permanently.

The second problem? Not so much… even re-installing iTunes didn’t help it. It’s just a giant steaming turd of iTunes suckage I have to click through now every goddamned time I plug in my iPhone.

And yes, I made Apple’s techs wait on the phone the whole time it took me to uninstall iTunes (4 uninstallers!), download a new copy from the web, and install it again (one installer with 2 UAC prompts!) If they’re going to release shoddy products, they’ll have to cough up the dough to keep those techs paid when I run into problems. Even trivial problems, in fact, even more so for trivial problems simply out of spite.

I bet if every iPhone user who had problems with iTunes called them up, they’d be rushing to make a new version of iTunes with the shittiness removed. Am I the only one who gets bothered by crappy software that hardly works?

Oh well. The iPhone works, finally, and it’s busy loading itself up with music from my media server.

* No, idiot Apple tech, my default Vista cookie settings are not the cause of the problem, otherwise you’d get 10,000 calls a week about this exact same issue from other Vista users! Engage your brain!

WarGames: The Dead Code

This movie sucks. Just in case you’re the kind of person who doesn’t read more than the first sentence of a review, I wanted to make sure I got that right in front. If you’re the kind of person who only reads the first paragraph of a review, I’d also like to mention that it’s rare that I actually review something relatively close to when it was actually released, so I’m hoping that I can actually warn you away from this piece of crap before you waste time and/or money on it. Please, please do not waste time and/or money on this movie.

If you really care, the review below contains spoilers.

The original WarGames, while is might not be the best movie ever made, is clever and, while it takes some liberties with the capabilities of computers, actually does a very good job of accurately portraying what computers were like in the mid-80s when it was released. I’m pretty sure that nobody involved with the making of WarGames: The Dead Code has never used, or even seen, an actual computer in their life. Yes, I’m even including the crew who did the CGI special effects. They must have done them via FedEx or something, I don’t know.

Now to be fair, while there are some portions of the film where it feels like I’m watching a high school play, I think the acting was actually fairly competent. With the exception of a single horrible song during the end credits, I think the soundtrack was competent. And the special effects crew actually did a decent job of making it all look relatively real. In fact, this movie has nearly all the ingredients in place to create a decently entertaining, or at least not terrible, B-level direct-to-video film. Until it was all sabotaged by Randall M. Badat and Rob Kerchner.

You see, Randall M. Badat and Rob Kerchner (hereafter referred to as Wingus and Dingus) wrote WarGames: The Dead Code, apparently on their vintage 1904 Underwood typewriter. They could afford their antique typewriter using royalties from the product placement, but more about that later. The problem, as I suggested above, is that Wingus and Dingus here have never actually used a computer before in their lives. They’ve also never talked to anybody who’s ever used a computer. In fact, until the last half-hour of the movie, I was beginning to doubt that they’d even seen WarGames!

The movie starts with some pointless T&A when a whole bunch of Russian prostitutes are hired by some terrorist group, which is then promptly bombed by a UAV piloted by the evil computer R.I.P.L.E.Y. (which probably stands for something but I’d have to watch the movie again to confirm that and nothing doing!)

After that, the two main characters are introduced. You can tell Dennis is a “hacker” because he is playing Stargate: Worlds. Product placement! (As Hollywood has been telling us for years, anybody interested in video games must be a computer hacker and, in fact, video games have little other purpose than masking hacking attempts. The Dead Code is no different.) To be more accurate, he’s playing what is obviously some kind of trailer or promotional video for the game, since he’s basically just randomly wailing on the keyboard to control his character, and when the character dies we’re instantly taken to a huge promotional wallpaper for the game. Get used to it; in this weird alternative universe, virtually all computers have huge promotional wallpapers for Stargate: Worlds. Product placement!

Also speaking of getting used to stupid things, virtually every computer in this movie is controlled by people spazzing out on keyboards. Having never seen a computer before, I suppose I can excuse Wingus and Dingus for not understanding the purpose of a mouse.

Dennis then tries to talk his buddy Will into playing World of Warcraft, but Will refuses since he’s still paying off his debt from the last time. Wingus and Dingus seem to believe that you can somehow lose $2000 gambling on World of Warcraft. You can’t; but the real tragedy here is that if the dull duo had spent any time actually talking to a gamer, they’d learn that there are online multiplayer games you can gamble money on. WOW just isn’t one of them. And “Blood Fangore?” What even is that?

Instead of playing WOW, they decide to play a game on a new gambling site called “The Dead Code.” Mostly because R.I.P.L.E.Y.’s icon for the game is a poorly-drawn pixelized cartoon of a woman in camouflage that Dennis thinks is “hot.” In this game, you play a terrorist with access to a UAV full of biological and chemical weapons, and are charged with flying it over an urban area and killing as many people as possible before the authorities manage to shoot you down. Oh, the game is actually run by some stereotypical men-in-black types. If you reach level 5, you’re declared to be a terrorist and R.I.P.L.E.Y. kills you using a UAV. You heard it here first, folks: if you gamble on the Internet, you’re a terrorist!

Will is doing good at the game, but at one point he runs out of his chemical weapon (or something happens to make it go away, it was vague on that point) and is asked to choose a new biological weapon. He gets the choice of sarin or weaponized anthrax. If you pick anthrax, you are actually a world-renowned expert on biological weapons, at least according to the men-in-black. Since there are only two choices given, I’m guessing that 50% of the planet is actually world-renowned experts on biological weapons.

In the game the number of people you kill is called the “morbidity rate.” At first I thought this was a typo in the script but, no, Wingus and Dingus actually use the term “morbidity rate” consistently throughout the movie whenever they actually mean “mortality rate.” And nobody corrected it! Even the CGI guys put “morbidity rate” on the R.I.P.L.E.Y. readout! (“Morbidity rate” makes me think: “oh my God! They’re going to turn people into goths!”

Of course Dennis and Will are both declared to be terrorists by the mysterious shadow government and Dennis is captured. (Will manages to get on a flight to Toronto.) The men-in-black question Dennis for awhile in an airport parking garage, using the usual “we’re above the law” cliche used in all terrible movies, until they finally realize he’s not the one they’re looking for and they apparently just let him go.

Will meets up with his weird-looking love interest, Annie, in Toronto. They quickly realize that they’re being chased by R.I.P.L.E.Y. who apparently has unrestricted access to every surveillance camera ever built. And controls the Canadian police. And can fly an armed UAV from the middle east to Toronto in only a few minutes.

There’s a “cute” scene where they are hungry and want to order a hot dog, but neither of them knows how to say “hot dog” in French. It turns out that the hot dog vendor speaks English! Ha ha! Wingus and Dingus, that would actually have been a charming scene were it not for the fact that everybody in Toronto speaks English! You retards!

And the plot develops into a long and boring chase sequence until they meet up with, gasp, Professor Falkin! (Not the same actor, of course.) He’s been keeping tabs on the whole situation in some manner that isn’t fully explained, and came to help them shut down R.I.P.L.E.Y. for good. Did I mention that R.I.P.L.E.Y. decided to kill everybody in Philadelphia because Will’s mom works for a chemical company? That’s actually the plot of the movie; try and pretend it makes any sense.

Falkin takes the kids to an old power station outside of the city where W.O.P.R. is being used to run Toronto’s power grid, apparently. He starts up the “Joshua” program, and sets it to task attacking R.I.P.L.E.Y. The power station gets bombed by a UAV (killing Falkin, if I recall correctly; it says a lot for the crappiness of this movie that I don’t remember nor care whether a main character dies) and Will and Annie get brought to the men-in-black’s headquarters.

The end of the movie revolves around hacking into an MMO game to use the players’ computers to DoS the evil computer. The game used is Stargate: Worlds, which is coincidentally also an MGM property. Unfortunately, Wingus and Dingus prominently show Stargate: Worlds running on a Macintosh when it’s only planned to be released for Windows. Even the product placement for this movie is a fail. Of course the DoS “distraction” was enough for W.O.P.R. to take over and tell R.I.P.L.E.Y. to run the Global Thermonuclear War simulation and realize that “the only winning move is not to play,” thus saving the world. Yawn.

WarGames: The Dead Code is so bad it’s actually made me hate the original WarGames. The one and only redeeming feature is that they used the same W.O.P.R. prop. Avoid. And if you’re Randall M. Badat or Rob Kerchner, please take this opportunity to die in a fire. Thank you.

An email I was recently required to send a complaint to New Line Cinema (movies@newline.com; their email address is hard to find, but that one seems most relevant) after suffering an embarrassing and annoying experience with their broken copy protection.

Hello,

I recently rented the DVD of the movie “Shoot ‘Em Up” from Blockbuster Online. I was originally planning to view this movie on my laptop, since I have a long train commute to work, but I found I wasn’t able to. The disk didn’t seem to read or work correctly in either VLC or Windows Media Player. Once I got home from work, I instead tried to view it on my Dell desktop computer, but I had the same issues as on my laptop. So I attempted to play the DVD on my Macintosh G5 computer, only to find that it wouldn’t play on that computer either.

I tried:
1) A HP laptop computer, using both VLC and Windows Media Player
2) A Dell desktop computer, using both VLC and Windows Media Player
3) A Macintosh G5 desktop computer, using both DVD Player.app and VLC
4) An Xbox 360 game console

The Xbox is the only device in my entire household that seemed able to play the DVD, and I was finally able to watch the movie using it.

The DVD is not scratched or damaged, so I can only assume that the problem is caused by some copy protection you placed on the disk. I understand the need to protect creative works from piracy and copyright infringement, and as a software developer I often face the same types of issues that a movie studio does.

However, I would never create a product that simply does not work on my client’s/user’s computer to meet this need of copy protection. This DVD is, in a word, defective. All of the above devices have the standard DVD logo on them, and are perfectly capable of playing every other DVD I’ve come across.

Since I rented this DVD and did not purchase it, it would be out of place for me to demand any compensation for the time and effort it took to determine why this DVD was not playing on my various computers. I do hope that you take a step back and realize that one of the primary reasons people pirate movies such as Shoot ‘Em Up is the increasingly strict copy protection that refuses to allow them to play the movie the way they want it played. I’ve never downloaded a movie over bittorrent before, but I sure was tempted when I wasn’t able to play this one after three attempts—I can guarantee the bittorrent download would have played on my laptop the first try!

Thank you for your attention,

- James Schend

I’m not usually one of those foaming-at-the-mouth “DRM and copy protection is evil!” type of person, but making and selling a product that simply does not work in the name of copy protection is way over the line. Way over the New Line (ha ha, get it?)

I like Will Smith. Not necessarily because I think he’s a great actor, but because he has a knack for picking good movies to act in. His worst, I, Robot, was still very watchable and entertaining, assuming you’re not one of those “it’s not like the novel!” geeks.

But his new movie, Hancock, is asking for trouble. It’s a comedy movie with a superhero, or a superhero comedy… and in the entire history of films I’ve been exposed to, I’ve never seen a half-decent superhero comedy. With one exception.

Let’s review. Does anybody remember My Super Ex-Girlfriend? No? Not surprising, since it has a Rotten Tomatos rating of only 41%, and was in and out of theaters faster than you could blink.

(I have to admit, I haven’t seen this movie. The previews looked terrible enough to scare me away. All I really know about it is that it stole the “wielding a shark as a melee weapon” from an issue of Flare:)

Disney got into the action with their film about superheros attending a special superhero high school where they learned to control their powers named Sky High. Kurt Russel and a relatively-sizeable role by Bruce Campbell couldn’t save this turkey. I think it’s safe to say I’ve never seen a more formulaic and cliche-ridden movie in my life, although I was impressed by the lengths it went to defeat its own premise in the final ten minutes. (Premise, stated dozens of times: even the sidekicks can contribute and fight crime. Climax of movie: former sidekick can only save school by becoming a full-powered hero. Hypocrites.) Rotten Tomatos, surprisingly, gives this one 73%, and I have no idea why.

Next in line, we have the horrible The Meteor Man. This movie stars Robert Townsend as an urban do-gooder who gains superpowers. I actually don’t remember a lot about this movie either, other than he had the power to learn any ability by touching a book about it, which led to a “hilarious” sequence in a library where he and his similarly-powered counterpart constantly changed tactics as they touched different books on the ground. Rotten Tomatos gives The Meteor Man a dismal 25%.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, Will Smith? Be careful out there, ok? This could be the first real stinker of your career, and I don’t want to see that happen.

(Oh, the good movie? I think Mystery Men is hilarious. But a lot of people disagree with me.)

The one sentence review: Cloverfield is unfortunately kind of disappointing, and bring your Dramamine if you’re sitting close to the screen.

Look, I like kaiju movies. I like serious Godzilla, the Godzilla of the 50s and 90s. I like crazy Godzilla, the Godzilla of every other decade. Yes, even Godzilla’s Revenge. (What? It’s funny… don’t look at me like that.) I like crazy Gamera, and I believe honestly that Gamera truly is friend to all children. I like the serious Gamera of the 90s, which are still pretty crazy when you think about them, just with more gruesome effects. I even like Garuda, even though it’s not really in the same genre.

I’m also the first person to proudly say that despite its name, kaiju movies are an American invention, damnit. Even if you don’t think King Kong counts, there’s still this awesome little flicked named The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms which not only fits the genre’s conventions perfectly, but was released a year and change before the original Godzilla and had special effects by Ray Harryhausen and was written by Ray Bradbury and you really can’t beat that.

So what I’m getting at here is you’d think I’d enjoy Cloverfield simply by default, and I didn’t really. It had some moments that were truly worthwhile, but the film as a whole just didn’t gel for me for whatever reason. And it didn’t help that…

Spoilers Ahead

… the monster sucked! All I can say about the monster is that it’s a good thing the cast and crew kept it such a tight-lipped secret, because if they’d released photos of it I think it would have hurt their chances at the box office. Yes, gentle viewers, New York was being destroyed by a monster that not only had killer lice, but literally could not stand upright. Being one hundred feet tall? Scary. Waddling around on flippers? Not scary. The two even out to give the general reaction, “eh.” When the reaction to the main character of your film is “eh” (and let’s face it, people go to kaiju films to see the monster), then you got problems.

The second problem is that Cloverfield doesn’t explain anything. Where does the monster come from? I dunno. Why is it in Manhatten? No clue. How come when the little killer lice bite you your head explodes? Shrug. I’m ignoring the questions that apply to all monster/horror movies, such as: “how come weapons that can penetrate 20′ thick reinforced concrete are useless against a fleshy creature?” and “why the hell are they just standing there gaping when they’re in mortal danger?” Even Spielberg’s War of the Worlds gave a BS explanation for the alien’s presence. (They buried the spaceships a million years ago, then teleported into them under cover of a thunderstorm… God that movie sucked.)

Cloverfield also makes use of the new popular technique to make movies and TV shows look “more real” by not using a Steadicam at all. Actually, the entire movie is a first-person viewpoint from a camcorder held by one of the characters, which flashbacks provided by the un-erased parts of the tape he was recording on, so that when the camera jogs or skips you see a few minutes of what it recorded a couple weeks before the events of the movie. I thought that was pretty clever. I’m not a huge hater of the hand-held camera look like a lot of people are, but I do want to warn you if you’re going to see the movie that this camera moves. There are several-minute long scenes of it pointing randomly downwards while the characters are running. There’s one shot where the camera falls 40′ to the ground. (I want to know what model that is, damn it’s durable.) Unlike, say, I Am Legend or Battlestar Galactica which are filmed with hand-held cameras that are held pretty steady, the camera in Cloverfield really, really moves. I sat too close to the screen, don’t make the mistake I did.

So, in short, despite some exciting moments, I think the negatives of Cloverfield outweigh the positives and I left the theater pretty disappointed.