by Shadowmancer | Jan 17 2008
Cloverfield. If you’re at all like me, you’ve been champing at the bit to find out what the hell this movie is since the first teaser trailer was attached to Transformers (I suppose something interesting had to be attached to it). Those first shots were stunning: the party, and the head of Lady Liberty crashing through the streets of Manhattan, shot by a digital handicam, grabbed me. We waited for a title, but there was none. Just the Bad Robot animation, a symbol that we, as Alias fans, immediately connected to J.J. Abrams.
It wasn’t long before the blogging community started finding the various bits of viral marketing that popped up, and the movie was generating huge amounts of buzz before it even had a name. We finally got the release date of 1.18.08, and finally we found out that one of the movies various codenames was actually the title: Cloverfield. As a bit of trivia, Cloverfield is the street that Bad Robot studios is on.
So what is it?
The Godzilla Project, essentially. Comparisons to The Blair Witch Project are inevitable. The entire film is shot with a handheld camcorder (and will make you motion sick, if you’re at all susceptible). It is presented as evidence of the Department of Defense; part of a “sighting,” recovered from what “used to be Central Park.” If it was discovered in the ruins of Central Park, that doesn’t bode well for our protagonists, does it?
The story follows a group of friends from a farewell party into the streets of New York as a creature attacks the city. The basic concept isn’t that original, but Cloverfield has a twist: the characters aren’t important. Not one of them is a scientist, a soldier, or a spunky kid. They exist almost entirely on the periphery of the monster’s rampage. The creature remains mysterious, never explained, and rarely seen in anything resembling a clear shot. The parasites that live on the creature are far more exposed, but that makes sense: they exist at the same scale as the characters.
This is a monster movie for a post-9/11 world. The images of disaster are inextricably linked with the footage of the destruction of the World Trade Center. To some extent this is intentional: what better way to evoke the horror of the situation than to tie it in our minds with a watershed moment in our lifetimes? But more importantly, it’s inevitable. It is largely impossible for us to think of an urban disaster now without visions of the dusty streets of Manhattan, with ash and paper floating around cars turned grey with blasted concrete. The enormity of the situation is impossible for the characters to ignore or comprehend. Deaths in this film are sudden and quick. The nature of the chaos around them keeps anyone from having a “hollywood” style death scene. The characters react pretty realistically to their situation, from the inappropriate jokes of Hud, the cameraman, to the sweet, but ultimately ill-advised actions of Rob.
The movie does have flaws. Certain elements feel very much like an amusement park ride, like the late King Kong or Back to the Future rides at Universal Studios. But that’s fairly easily overlooked…
I have a feeling most people are going to hate this movie for almost exactly the reasons I loved it. Cloverfield injects a bit of humanity and intelligence into a genre traditionally known for rubber suits and rocket turtles. I’m going to give it an eight of ten.
Rating: 8/10
Tags:
review, movies, j.j. abrams, cloverfield
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S p o n s o r s
Good review.
I have never heard about the movie before this review, but it makes me want to go see it when/if (a definate if) it gets to the theatre here in Denmark, if it doesn’t i might catch it on DVD at some time.
Shadowmancer,
As always, a good concise review. You definitely have me interested in going to see it. BTW, have you seen the original Godzilla? I mean the one without the Raymond Burr scenes(which were added to make the film more marketable here in the US.) There is a scene in there of a mother and child cringing in the ruins when Godzilla kills them. It’s a very striking scene. It looks like something you would’ve seen in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Frank
Article Author
@Munch:
I would definitely see it. From a role playing perspective, it’s an interesting look at storytelling for characters that aren’t necessarily big players in the world. Even small players can be swept up in huge events.
@Frank:
I’m afraid I’ve only seen it with the Raymond Burr scenes added in, but Godzilla is one of those things… As powerful and iconic as the concept is to us, it was a visceral horror to the Japanese. Culturally, between Hiroshima/Nagasaki, their inbuilt xenophobia and their fear of the ocean, he’s terrifying. You can watch as he shifted from a menacing figure to a protective one. I wonder how that maps to their acceptance of nuclear power as a form of energy, rather than purely destruction?
Shadowmancer,
Great point about Godzilla(or Gojira as it used to be known). It does make a lot of sense. In the same vein that the Saw and Hostel movies as well as other “torture porn” map to our society’s increasing narcissim and obsession with physical beauty.
Frank
I’ve been waiting to see Cloverfield for a bit now and I really wasn’t at all disappointed. You’re right; it wasn’t perfect, but it was the type of movie that kept me glued to the screen. The realistic approach, ie “this is what you would do if your city was attacked by a big monster and you had a camera” had me hooked. My girl is VERY susceptible to motion sickness and there were a few moments (running scenes where the camera was jostled repeatedly) that saw her turning green.
Personally, my favorite thing about the movie is the complete lack of explanation. You never know what the monster is or where it came from. Too many movies spend pointless minutes taking away all the mystery.
Thanks for writing the review. Had I not already wanted to go (despite my distaste for crowds and theatres), it would have at least made me curious enough to take the chance.
Article Author
@Frank:
I’ve seen about a third of the first Saw, and I’m not interested in seeing more, or the Hostel movies. It mirrors the evolution of pornography in another way as well: plots are increasingly vestigial, and soon it will be nothing but a series of grotesqueries with no context beyond the act itself. Blah.
@Black_wind_fen:
I liked the lack of explanation too. “Whatever it is, it’s winning.” Given the outcome of the film, we don’t even know if the monster was destroyed or not. I hope it hits New Jersey next.
I think my problems with Cloverfield are twofold. One, since the focus is on the humans it plays out more like a slasher flick horror movie than it does anything else. You’ve got the stereotype characters for the most part and they’re getting cut down one by one as the main character tries to save the love of his life. It’s a bit more intelligent than most slasher flicks but the way it plays out is so similar that I refuse to look at this like a monster movie.
Secondly, the big difference here for me though is that there is no point to this monster. It’s an image of destruction, sure, but there’s no actual point to it. Sure some of the Kaiju from Japan have little point beyond silly fight scenes but by and large the genre has usally tried injecting some reason or point into their stories even if it isn’t the monsters whole purpose like Godzilla was. For me that’s kind of a killer right there.
Article Author
I’d actually argue that there’s a difference between there being “no point to this monster,” and us simply never being told what the point is.
The main conceit of Cloverfield is that we’re on the ground, viewing the same sort of amateur journalism that is quickly becoming a zeitgeist: look at the footage from Virginia Tech, or the recent bridge collapse that all the news networks aired… It wasn’t professional footage, it was man-on-the-street recording. Joe normal who just happened to have a video camera at the right place and the wrong time. Because of that framing mechanism, we’re not privy to any of the normal avenues to explain the creature’s purpose or origin. We don’t have the Jeff Goldblum character from Independence Day to figure out that it’s a countdown. These characters really don’t matter at the monster’s scale. And they don’t know what’s going on any more than the people working in the World Trade Center did. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason for the attack, or an origin of the monster, simply that these characters don’t know it.
Like Fen said above, I actually liked that the monster remained mysterious.
I think the movie is very in tune with the general mood of western society today. We fear that something we don’t understand will come and destroy society as we know it, so in that sense it is very in tune with what Shadowmancer said above about Gozilla.
[spoiler]
(dont read on if you havent watched, or plan to watch, the movie)
There is a bit of an “explaination” at the end of the movie where we get a scene from before the mayhem starts and in the background we see something crashing into the sea aparantly from space.
[/spoiler]
Article Author
Crap. I missed that. Now I want to watch it again.
Wait.. In one of the amusement park shots? I didn’t even notice anything going into the water.
Godzilla was born from the atom bomb and the fear the end of WWII wrought upon the Japanese. I think the monster from Cloverfield is very much the same.
As far as the footage goes… VT and the bridge collapse were things that happened to other people, but that when you watched, you could almost put yourself into their place. I live in Omaha, Nebraska and in December, we had an individual walk into one of our busiest malls & kill several people. That day, I was Christmas shopping at another mall. *I* could have been in their shoes. It makes any footage from a tragedy, whether shot on a handy cam or more “professional” gear, really hit home with me.
I really don’t care if there is an explanation for the creature. I don’t think it’s relevant. Lovecraft never offered an explanation for why Great Cthulhu chose to land on earth. It just did. His was and still is a very bleak view of the cosmos to wit that there are forces out there that will come along and destroy everything that we hold near and dear for no apparent reason. We, humanity, just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I completely agree that an explaination doesn’t nessecarily help a story. Cloverfield would have been just as well off without that little tidbit in the end.
It’s not that I need an explanation. It’s that as it stands the movie seems to be more of a hacker flick that just so happens to have a big monster in it. The whole thing just seems… blah, irrelevant once the movie is over. The humans were just there to get slaughtered and the “story” as it was goes nowhere without an explanation to the monster. Essentially its just one running destruction flick and fairly mindless at that. I find more enjoyment out of thinking about the monster than I do watching the movie about the monster.