Filmed through a video camera carried around by participants in the catastrophe it depicts, Cloverfield has drawn understandable comparisons to The Blair Witch Project. But where the earlier movie was an interesting experiment, Cloverfield works as a full-blown feature film. Where Blair Witch meandered through the spooky woods with its film student auteurs, who gradually became the unwanted subject of their own home movie, Cloverfield is masterfully edited and paced, making the jumps in time and gaps in space appear as the fumbling uncertainty of amateurs who thought they were making a video record of their friend’s going-away party.

They are all going away, as it transpires. The party thrown by the affluent twenty-something New Yorkers, a “Sex and the City” crowd if there ever was, ends early and abruptly. Loud thuds and enormous explosions cut short the festivities.

Car alarms are triggered across Manhattan by the shudders. The skyscrapers go dark. Cable news reports “a possible earthquake” in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty. Within minutes the partygoers have a vantage the news anchor lacks when the face of Lady Liberty wheels through the air and smashes against the pavement outside their loft.

The first half-hour of Cloverfield is a descendant of the little movies Andy Warhol once made of his Factory crowd, but better edited and composed. It cap- tures the less-than-scintillating chatter of the beautiful people in real time, the camera mugging of people socialized in part by bad television. It also raises questions of privacy in our increasingly transparent society. What if the camera guy stumbles onto an intimate, embarrassing or hurtful situation? Not everyone wants everything they do turning up on YouTube.

The potential cinematic boredom of the party scene, with lots of talk but little of consequence, is ameliorated by its realism and hurled quickly along through kinetic editing. The viewfinder never lingers long on scenes that don’t require a second look. A sense for the main characters is established in fast, fleeting strokes before the monster strikes.