I actually enjoyed Cloverfield quite a bit. I went in with an expectation that I was going to be watching a monster movie, and with a set expectation as to what a monster movie was: Big nasty beast for some reason shows up, smashes the crap out of stuff, kills a whole bunch of people and then gets killed, maybe. And that, to a T, is Cloverfield.
There's no real plot because everyone just runs away and/or is killed. There's no character development, because no one lives long enough (and frankly, the destruction of a city by a giant lizard allowing a character to come to terms with a childhood trauma would be approaching a Uwe Boll level of pretension).
Lots of stuff getting broken/blown up, lots of yelling and screaming and a big nasty is all a monster movie needs. And I suppose it's a matter of aesthetics, really, but I liked the handycam approach to the whole thing. I'm rather bored with the current fixation on showing absolutely every single detail from every possible angle in resolutions so crisp you can see the goosebumps on the hero's arm for 50 yards away.
It's just so... Clinical. Flat. Boring. Souless.
If Cloverfield had been done in the current style of films, when the characters that were being followed around were running down the street yelling, "What the hell is that?" Instead of being right there with them thinking, "I don't know! What the hell
IS it?!", we'd be thinking, "It's an alien life form brought here inside a meteor 5000 years ago. It was stirred from it's cocoon by underwater nuclear tests and it has come to the surface looking for food. It is confused and frightened by it's surroundings, and that is why it is lashing out violently."
And when they wondered, "How can you kill that thing?" Instead of wondering the same thing, we'd be thinking, "Well, one of the fighter pilots did find a weakness in it's armor and exploit it, but no one knows about that right now because the monster managed to destroy the plane. There's also a wound it sustained while freeing itself from it's cocoon, and thanks to CSI-style zoom in effects and an apparently unrelated scene at the start of the movie, we know that there's a scientist nearby who has invented a chemical that causes the kind of bacteria infecting the monster to grow at an incredibly high rate, so that would be an option too, if our heroes manage to rescue the scientist and bring her (statistical probability be damned, it'd inevitably be a woman) to the military command post, where she'd have to convince the General that her crazy plan really will work."
The omniscient viewpoint works well for some types of film, but monster movies aren't one of them. Long winded expositions where all is revealed in painstaking detail belong in legal thrillers or spy movies. In a good monster movie, I don't have a clue what's going on, and frankly I don't care if you don't tell me, because something big just blew up.
Edit: Just realized the irony of bashing long winded expositions in this post.
Re: Star Trek XI Plot
Love it!
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