In the interest of disclosure: I had already read reviews of the film and knew who was going to die and how. Oh, and I strongly dislike watching "home videos," an aesthetic Cloverfield aimed at in its exposition.
Cloverfield failed to engage me on any successful level. While I enjoyed and was swept up by the shaky-cam cinematography of the Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield's was too artificial for me to suspend my disbelief; it just felt pretentious and made me continually aware that I was watching a disagreeable movie.
The one moment that caught me was the obvious 09.11.2001 reference / exploitation; since that day, anyone who saw and experienced watching the fall of the World Trade Center towers (in-person or on TV) will likely connect the implosion of high towers to that day.
The more I think about it, the more Cloverfield's cinematography strikes me as that of a first-person shooter game as opposed to the BWP. See the end part of Doom, the movie, for another example of this FPS cinematography; I suspect that Cloverfield and Doom match up in this regard.
The characters were stock white, yuppie persons and the actors had a thankless job in portraying such dead-on-arrival roles. Just about none of their moments were memorable (except for the "main dude" bit).
Something finally struck me about many of these monster-disaster movies when watching Cloverfield: was there a massive circus in one of the other boroughs or possibly a freebie-evening at a Teddy Bear Workshop in Queens? Manhattan was utterly childless on the evening the Cloverfield monster struck.
The Cloverfield monster was by far the most interesting part of the film.
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