Retrospective Film Review

Cloverfield (2008) • 15 Years Later

A group of friends venture deep into the streets of New York on a rescue mission during a rampaging monster attack.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) brought found footage — a hitherto experimental technique used on a handful of obscure movies — into the mainstream, proving that deliberately lousy production values and huge box office receipts weren’t incompatible. But it wasn’t until Cloverfield nine years later (then Paranormal Activity the following year) that found footage films again attained the critical and commercial success of Blair Witch.

A clever pre-release marketing campaign, tightly controlling the drip-feed of information online and encouraging it to spread virally, somewhat resembled that of its 1999 predecessor and helped Cloverfield gain widespread anticipation. So, doubtless, did the way the film presents an essentially conventional story (a young man and supportive pals struggle to rescue the woman he loves from peril in the midst of a more enormous disaster) in voguish found footage packaging, with plenty of blatant allusions to…