During the madness that is the Sundance Film Festival, I somehow managed to find the time to take in a midnight screening of this much talked about flick from J.J. Abrams.

Has the new monster movie Cloverfield re-invented the genre as we know it? Does it live up to the enormous hype that began generating back in July with the release of that brilliant trailer? Is this the motion picture event of the decade? These are questions flowing through many a movie geeks head. For my money this isn't the second coming of the classic monster movie, but it is an incredibly entertaining roller coaster ride.

2007 saw the release of two similarly themed films. In The Mist, a group of survivors band together to elude a slew of strange creatures unleashed by a military experiment gone horribly wrong. In I Am Legend, Will Smith plays a man battling rabid humans in an eerily deserted New York City. Like the Mist, Cloverfield has a creature(s) at the heart of it's story and as was the case in I Am Legend, this is also a story of survival in the Big Apple.

As Cloverfield opens, a group of attractive twenty somethings throw a going away party for a friend who's about to leave for and important job opportunity in Japan. At the crowded get together, one of the party goers, a shy goof-ball name Hud, is assigned the task of video taping farewell messages. The party is abruptly cut short when a tremor violently rattles the apartment. Scared and unsure of what's happening, these terrified twenty somethings ascend to the rooftop and quickly realize that what they just experienced wasn't an earthquake at all. In the distance, there are inexplicable explosions one of which sends fiery debris hurtling toward them. Rather than dropping the camera, Hud realizes that this pending disaster needs to be documented, so he leaves the camera running.

What's really great about Cloverfield is that it takes an idea that's been done to death and manages to breathe life into it. True, the handheld camera work and massive monster rampage might lead one to simply call this movie Blair Witch meets Godzilla, but there's much more to Cloverfield than its 50's B-movie mentality and the gimmicky hand held camera work.

Cloverfield uses its premise (the entire film seen through the lens of an amateur video camera) to it's fullest advantage. This style really adds to the intimacy of the proceedings, and it isn't as nausea-inducing as you might suspect - although I wouldn't recommend you sit in the front row.

The special effects are outstanding, and they never really become the centerpiece of the film. This is a big, monster movie and it does offer up a fair share of awe-inspiring visuals, but director Matt Reeves wisely uses the effects as a tool to help tell the story, but never allows them to become the story. Again, all the effects shots are from the point of view of Hud's camera. As he and his small band of friends frantically run through the streets of New York looking for a safe haven, we get but mere glimpses of the colossal creature wreaking havoc and gradually feeds the audience bigger doses as the film proceeds. Reeves subscribes to the "what you don't see is scarier than what you do see" theory of monster movie making, and it serves the film incredibly well. But take heart creature feature fans, we do get to see the beast in it's entirety, and when the monster is finally revealed, it is a moment of pure and utter terror.

Cloverfield isn't all perfect. There are a few moments that are slightly overacted and audiences will simply have to accept the fact that Hud would be so determined to document this big time disaster, rather than dropping the camera out of sheer panic.

Having said that, this is an immensely entertaining movie and it avoids many of the cliches that generally come with the territory. Cloverfield isn't interested in giving half assed explanations. We never find out where this monster comes from. There is a moment in the film when a key character spews obvious theories about the origins of the beast, but Cloverfield doesn't dwell on such business. Reeves and his team simply introduce us to these characters, and once we know them well enough to care about their well-being, he throws them into peril. This is a survival story and where it ends up, might upset casual movie goers. There is a kind of 9/11 inspired grotesqueness to the tone of the movie, and it is a little disconcerting. In the end though, this is a well paced creature feature with wonderfully intense sequences, big time scares, a group of characters worth caring about, and a monster worthy of the hype it's generating.