Last night I went watching a disaster movie called Cloverfield. The story was told from the viewpoint of a hand held camera. I was only aware of one of movie reviews after watching the movie.
A deft online marketing campaign finally pays off with the release of "Cloverfield", a thrilling monster romp that'll leave adrenaline surging in your veins long after the credits roll. (http://www.ourbrisbane.com/whatson/movies/titles/cloverfield)
I almost fell into sleep in the first 5 minutes when the hand-held camera was capturing people dong all sorts of party things. I wished the camera stopped, and real movie story line could begin. Then the disaster struck. The camera kept shaking left and right, up and down. My girl friend felt badly and had to bury the head aside, and I gradually felt uncomfortable, though I am not too bad at playing first-person-shooting games with puzzles rotating. I just wanted to shout out at that moment: Turn of that dam hand held camera, and give me a movie.
I guess the director got inspired by the popularity of online video sharing sites like YouTube and thought video clips from hand-held camera could be a good way of telling story. But this seems to defeat the purpose and advantages of cinema movies -- telling a story through different angles, and even with multiple story lines in parallel.
Using a hand-held camera telling a story through single angle is not much different from telling story through stage play. Both forms use single angle with only one story line.
Generally speaking, using a hand-held camera has its own place, mostly in producing B-class movies. Using a hand-held camera to tell about disaster apparently requires audiences to do heavy forensic analysis through pieces of low quality video clips of a single camera, in order to get the big picture of the whole story.
My girl friend and I left the cinema 20 minutes after the "movie" started.
I felt I was cheated. The movie's poster showed a great scene of the after mark of the disaster in New York, looking like another Hollywood blockbuster. However, in turn I just got video clips of a single-hand held camera, and the director tried to tell a blockbuster story through a B-class production.
