A new breed of monster movie

When the creative team behind what is arguably the best show on television (“Lost”) announced last summer they were releasing a monster movie,, I was sold sight unseen. The viral marketing campaign that followed their announcement, which dragged on far too long and became far too cryptic for its own good, dampened my spirits a bit, but the movie itself ended up delivering on so many levels that the marketing had to be forgiven.

This is the two-sided coin that is “Cloverfield,” now on DVD and far less likely to cause motion sickness than it did on the big screen. Marketing gimmicks have always plagued the “Lost” team by trying to speak for their products instead of the products speaking for themselves. “Lost”’s viral gimmicks and continual scheduling tweaks, while brilliant in their own sort of way, have always done nothing but distract from the meat of the show itself. “Cloverfield”’s viral campaign promised an epic monster clash with deeply-rooted mythology, instead of the intimate, character-driven clusterfuck that audiences ended up seeing.

J.J. Abrams and his director Matt Reeves, along with a solid cast of newcomers, blended the first-person hand-held style of “The Blair Witch Project” with the disastrous goings-on of a Roland Emmerich movie, and it’s truly a love-it-or-hate-it affair. A monster, whose existence and motives are never explained, and who is rarely seen in full view, has a beef with New York City and its denizens, and our yuppie protagonists are there to film it all from street-level. It’s a simple concept, and one that’s pulled off deftly by all involved.

The DVD release is peppered with enough extras to sate fans of the film, and also to explicate some of the information left out of the film, such as the monster’s possible origins and what happened after the camera stopped rolling. A feature commentary track with director Reeves is enlightening and occasionally funny, and featurettes covering production and visual effects are above average. Several deleted scenes are on display, mostly adding nothing to the film itself, and a couple of alternate endings are tacked on for good measure.

The best advice I can give is to ignore the hype, grab some Dramamine, and let one of Hollywood’s most talented production teams show you how a genre can be reinvented with style.