By Fred Topel

I wasn't sure how Cloverfield would look on Blu Ray. The whole aesthetic of the movie is a crappy home video camera.

Blu Ray does not betray that, but there are certainly moments where you appreciate that the actual film camera is much better than the one the character is presumably using.

Yeah, it's underlit and saturated. That makes the colors of New York city brighter but it all looks kind of dirty. It's not the glorious Blu Ray we've seen before. This is the aesthetic of the film.

When the camera holds still, it gets very sharp. As it's shaking and moving fast in the chaos, suddenly it focuses on something and brings it into clear focus and bright color. Plugging your own camera into an HDTV definitely does not look this good.

The visual effects look pretty cool. The Statue of Liberty head presents all the dings and burns of its destruction. Fire glows orange and monster appendages show the creature detail. The final reveal is shot through a dirty lens. Oh well.

Things in motion, be they creatures or vehicles, cut a crisp figure across the screen. There is a good lighting scheme all around. The orange glow of flames, the green city neon, the blue subway and other different tones of blue in the department store and military compound.

In the subway tunnel, the whole scene is pure black except for the camera spotlight lighting the characters. There is no grain for sure, or at least the grain of underlit scenes is an electronic defect, not film.

The Blu Ray has all the extras from the DVD, and in HD so if you want to watch the pointless deleted scenes, the redundant alternate endings or the not so amusing goofing off on set, they will fill your screen in full detail. I know you're all clamoring to see the techie talking heads in the EPK spots in full HD.

The Blu Ray exclusive extra is a stroke of genius. Surveillance mode plays the whole movie as a picture in picture alongside a map of Manhattan and a text grid. The map plots where the monster, the characters and the military are at all points in the film. The text grid features military file data.

Somebody wrote a whole lot of backstory for this. I would have loved something like this for the movies I loved as a kid, or maybe even for Saw now. And it lasts for the whole movie, so there's no copout. That is a genius use of Blu Ray. It is perfect for the pseudo-documentary science fiction audience.