Well. Sometimes a movie can be all about other movies, postmodernism is fine, there are countless examples of films which borrow moments or clichés from other films and use them as a starting point or a framework within which to work in originality or intelligent subversion/satire/whatever to bounce off it and create something worthwhile. In Cloverfield there is none of that, it's just every single thing we've seen before but with very little new or intelligent to it : in short, it's a complete hack-job.

You can imagine the pitch now "Blair Witch... in New York with a monster". And that's about as far as they go. Even the (I'm sure they were attempted to be "iconic")  imagery of the decapitated statue of Liberty isn't original. The style is pure Blair Witch... but the whole point of that film was a/ it was masquerading as real and b/ it was something we hadn't seen before. Neither of those key positives are present in this film.

It follows a group of utterly vapid "people" (I refuse to use the word "characters" as it implies they have them) via the taping of one of them's going away party. There is no tension in this film, just as they've been overdoing the party for long enough, around the time you're thinking "Ooh I wonder when the monster's coming" it kicks in. There are plenty of September the 11th allusions which would be offensive if they aspired to any meaning. The first of many problems is the people you're following aren't even drawn as characters so it's impossible to feel any emotional attachment to them. The second problem is the direction and screenwriting is flaccid and obvious. It doesn't take you anywhere new, it never surprises you, you know exactly what's coming 5 minutes before it happens because *you've seen these movies before* and all this one does is rip them off and not do anything with it.

It's not even that much fun to pick out what films they've taken certain scenes from and the only points of interest the film arouses are a/ how stupid the people are and b/ how unrealistic their actions are. So basically when you have a tired, predictable, unoriginal narrative (I refuse to use the word "story") told in a completely unispired way with barely competent actors portraying uselessly written people, there's absolutely nothing to recommend this piece of borderline exploitative trash to anyone other than maybe a few tribes in remote corners of Mongolia who won't have seen it all before.