10 Annoying Problems With Found Footage Movies
2. The Technology Often Makes No Sense
This is one of those things that you just have to overlook when watching a found footage movie, but half the time, the technology presented makes no sense. Sometimes the footage will be filled with weird stuttering to make things more dramatic, presumably because the camera is damaged, but those glitches aren’t anything that ever actually happens with a damaged camera.
Then there are specific issues, like how in Cloverfield it keeps cutting back to old footage at moments that it doesn’t really make sense for the tape to be doing that. A few movies use this idea of cutting to the tape the characters are recording over, but half the time the old tape comes on whenever it's necessary for the plot and not when it would make technological sense.
There’s also the giant elephant in the room in many of these movies that you’re watching footage supposedly from a person’s personal camcorder or from a camera recording on VHS tapes, yet it's all beautiful HD movie quality and looks like it was shot with cameras that cost thousands of dollars. But that’s a fair tradeoff if it means not spending 90 minutes watching a film that looks grainy and terrible.