Cloverfield UK DVD Review

Heres the first in many reviews on games, DVDs, movies and music I'll be posting in upcoming months. This time I'm reviewing Cloverfield's UK DVD release.

For starters, I absolutely loved this film. I followed its viral marketing campaign for over half a year before its release, which shows how much I was into this film.

After seeing the film at the cinemas in early February of this year, I was amazed. The film blew me away. Mind-numbing effects, brilliant acting, humour, romance and action. The film had it all. Its main concept was - what if you could watch a monster movie from the perspective of someone down on ground level, someone completely unimportant in the grand scheme of things, someone completely unable to do anything but watch the city crumble around them? The innovating thinking of all those involved made this film a landmark in movie history.

Onto the DVD review. Unlike most movies, Cloverfield, in my view, hasn't lost its impact when taken from the big screen and put onto DVD. This is mainly because Cloverfield's format, being like a personal home video, shaky and seemingly amature, it looks more real when views on household televisions. Saying that though, the film was amazing to watch at the cinema, but with most televisions and surround sound, it is easy to replicate the atmostphere of the cinema at home. Problem solved.

Disc 2 is jammed packed with extra material - an extensive Making Of documentary, a look at how the visual effects for the film were created, and a featurette entitled "I saw it, it's alive, it's huge!", which explains JJ Abrams' interest in Godzilla and covers creature designer Neville Page's conception of the Clover monster itself. 'Clover Fun' is a series of bloopers, in a way - mostly T.J. Miller, who played Hud, improvising silly dialogue, but also other cast members horseing around or accidentally catching members of the crew in their in-character taping, and props behaving like they have minds of their own.

There are four deleted scenes, with optional commentary from Matt Reeves, which are entertaining enough in themselves, but no great loss to the film (except maybe a moment between Lily and Marlena), and two alternate endings, one which doesn't change the outcome of the main storyline, but instead replaces the final footage of Rob and Beth at Coney Island with another scene of blissful, pre-monster ignorance, and one which does sort of change the ending of the movie, implying that perhaps Rob and Beth were rescued, maybe. The version used in the actual film is probably the best, but these are nice too methinks.

There are loads of hidden extras. I won't list them here, as searching for them yourself can make it all the more enjoyable.

Movie:

Extras: (only four because region 1 DVDs have more extras grrrr)