It’s big. Really, really big. So huge, in fact, that you can see it from practically any street corner in Manhattan. It’s so huge people in Japan are talking about it. It consumes everything in its path. It induces panicked, frenzied behavior in adults. Even on a purely technical level it takes your breath away when you realize its scale, when you grasp how much time and money went into making it work, when you understand its complexity.

It is the marketing campaign for “Cloverfield,” which finally reaches theaters on Friday.

The producer J.J. Abrams, the pop culture genius behind TV’s “Lost,” “Alias,” and “Felicity,” knows how to play his audience like a marimba, and the build up to his low-budget monster movie “Cloverfield” has been a mad marketing melody of monstrous proportions. For lovers of old media, there are ads pasted to every available flat surface.

For new-media-hungry kids, there’s a fiesta of fake Web sites and a viral marketing campaign has spread like rabies. Do you know Slusho? Who works for Tagruato? Did T.i.d.o. Wave have anything to do with the destruction of the Chuai drilling platform? I don’t know either, but information prospectors have spent months sifting the Internet for hard facts about “Cloverfield,” feverishly analyzing every carefully leaked nugget. But with great hype comes great expectations, and the question on the minds of every man, woman, and child infected by the “Cloverfield” campaign is: Does it live up to its marketing?

The answer, in short, is no.

Shot entirely on a video camera wielded by dopey stoner Hud (T.J. Miller), “Cloverfield” opens at a farewell party for Hud’s best friend, Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who has landed a new job in Japan. As Hud tapes testimonials from friends (“Love ya, bro!”) we get some awkward backstory: Rob recently sealed the deal with the love of his life, Beth (Odette Yustman), whom he subsequently treated shabbily, and she shows up at the sayonara bash with another guy. The lovebirds fight, she storms off to her apartment in the Time Warner Center, and he sulks on the fire escape while some pals try to cheer him up with increasingly funny frat-boy platitudes. Suddenly an explosion rocks the city, and one by one, the skyscrapers go dark. Goosebumps prickle down your arms.

Something bad is happening.

Partygoers mill about in the street, asking if anyone knows what’s going on, and then the flaming head of the Statue of Liberty rockets through the sky, crashes to the pavement, and rolls down the block before coming to a rest on a line of parked cars. As dazed New Yorkers snap camera-phone photos, an eerie, otherworldly bellow rings through the night and a building collapses. Jolted out of their stupor, bystanders run, screaming, trying to stay ahead of the avalanche of white dust racing through the streets behind them like a wall of water. If you were in the city on September 11, 2001, you’ll feel something dark slither through your gut. It’s a sustained set piece of sweaty-palmed tension, a build-up for the big reveal of the long-hidden, building-sized monster, and it’s as expertly deployed as the marketing campaign for the movie itself.

But these moments of unease are few and far between, and entirely the work of the technical department, which uses sound design, editing, and digital effects to create four brief sequences that elicit the thrills of the rock ‘n’ roll Ragnarok we want in a movie about a giant monster trashing Manhattan. Everything else in this movie is as bland and by-the-numbers as a made-for-television movie. Mr. Abrams and his director, Matt Reeves (an executive producer and writer of “Felicity”), have invented so much of modern television grammar that chiding them for doing what comes naturally feels unchivalrous. But there’s a difference between movies and television apart from the size of their budgets.

Feature films demand a level of engagement that television doesn’t, and what passes muster on the small screen looks ridiculous on the big one. The fact that one of the characters in “Cloverfield” performs acts of daring that would put an alpine climber to shame while wearing 3-inch heels, and the fact that another sprints through the rubble-clogged Manhattan streets in bare feet with no noticeable ill effects, wouldn’t give you pause on a TV show, but here they reek of inauthenticity. That problem is trumped, however, by the curious lack of thrills.

There’s never a moment in “Cloverfield” when it feels like all bets are off, that the safety net has been removed, that anything could happen. Every twist occurs well within the bounds of broadcast propriety — no one freaks out, no one loses it, no one screams at anyone else, they’re always camera-ready. Genuine human emotions are too messy for television drama; they take up too much airtime, so when a couple is torn asunder in a hideous accident, one Dr. Phil-approved cry later the survivor brushes the dust from her dress and is ready to keep things moving to the next set piece.

Rob and Beth’s love story is supposed to provide the axis on which the movie turns, but it’s bland enough to make you desperate for a glimpse of the monster, who is at least doing something interesting. But the filmmakers refrain from showing their creature too soon because, as on “Lost,” they know that once they divulge the mystery, they’ve played their only card. But then, on the other side of the dramatic spectrum, natural human behavior in this flick is so rare that when it briefly flickers on-screen, it’s easy to over-praise it.

At a brisk 90 minutes, “Cloverfield” is too fast-paced and well-produced to completely exhaust our enthusiasm for major monster mayhem, but it doesn’t take long for the lack of story to become tiring. Like some tourist from the Midwest, once the creature stumbles into Manhattan and visits Central Park and the Empire State Building, there’s nothing left for it to do but knock around aimlessly, getting in trouble and making a mess on the sidewalks.

Inspired by the popularity of YouTube, this movie aims for realism, but watching its plasticized, television-ready version of reality only serves to remind us of the wisdom of the YouTube hive mind: When we watch an online video of a monkey attack, we don’t have to wade through an hour of boring safari footage to get to the good stuff because we don’t need a story if it’s real. But faking realism is an art, and the bigger the screen, the easier it is to tell when the creators are lying. A genuine YouTube version of “Cloverfield” would last all of 10 minutes, and so perhaps the most satisfyingly realistic thing about this movie is that it purports to be a tape found in Central Park by the Department of Defense. That makes sense. Only a bunch of middle-aged Washington drones wouldn’t know how to find the fast-forward button on their remote control.