Cloverfield– Redefining the Monster Movie
Beware Minor Spoilers
In the late ’90s, the Blair Witch Project attempted to shock and horrify like no other scary movie could by making a film look like it was shot by novices on a cheap home video camera. This made everything appear more real and elevated the urgency of the most frightening moments because it was shot from a first person perspective, at human eye level, and with the person operating the camera yelling obscenities behind the camera. It was revolutionary in a lot of ways and I have respect for it. As most people by now are no doubt aware, the makers of that film originally tried to make the public believe it was a real tape they had found and released, and it looked so real a lot of people believed them.
Now comes Cloverfield, the film that cleverly uses the first-person, Blair Witch home video concept and merges it with a big budget monster movie. It’s much more of a disguised summer blockbuster than a horror film. I have to say, monster and disaster films aren’t my favorite genres, but this movie blew me away. Digitally rendering a monster that’s supposed to look hundreds of stories tall is hard. Making that monster look real, and not like a CGI image, is hard. Making it look like it’s really destroying buildings in New York City is hard. Getting actors to act correctly with the CGI so that looks real is hard. But imagine trying to do all that and filming it with what essentially looks like a HI-8 camera that’s constantly being shaken wildly. That should be impossible. But JJ Abrams’ team did it, and I really think that if someone hundreds of years from now found a copy of this movie and NYC was destroyed, it looks so real they’d think that monster did it.
It’s not the thickest plot in the world. Some college-aged kids are having a going away party for their friend who’s moving to Japan and Hud is filming it when the monster attacks the city. The kids run outside to see buildings on fire and buildings falling down. They try to get out of the city, but the bridge they run across gets demolished by the monster, so they have to go back. Our protagonists then discover that one of their friends is trapped in her apartment and might be bleeding to death, so instead of going with the military to be evacuated, they decide to go into the heart of the carnage, into Midtown, to rescue their friend. And I don’t think I’m giving too much away by saying, as you’d expect, a whole lot of people die.
You can’t go see a film like this expecting a deep message or a real psychological experience. The film is meant to capture a realistic immediacy, and it’s best described as Godzilla meets 9-11. If a huge monster attack really happened in a big city, someone would probably get the whole thing on tape, just like people did during the terrorist attacks. I don’t think the movie is making fun of this or even trying to capitalize on 9-11– if anything, that’s where what little psychology is in the movie comes in. People feel that it’s necessary to capture something like this on film so everyone will understand what the people went through who lost their lives in a horrible catastrophe. When the monster first attacks and our protagonists run outside, you can hear someone in the background ask if it’s another terrorist attack. I thought that was a nice touch.
More than anything, this movie is a special effects bonanza. I don’t want to spoil all of the cool moments, but you’ll find yourself very often saying, “how in the world did they do that?” The monster is pretty original, looking nothing like Godzilla or any other major movie monster. It also has little monsters that drop off of it and attack on the ground. I would have liked to have some clue as to where the monster came from other than a little speculation from our college-aged protagonists who really have no idea– how could they? But again, it’s such a fun ride and looks so real that it’s hard to dwell on it. I found it easier to suspend disbelief because of the film’s format– if you only get it from one person’s perspective, and it’s someone who isn’t a scientist or military, then you probably won’t ever know where the monster came from.
The most impressive thing about the movie is how few cuts there are. Every time a scene has to cut somewhere, it’s presented like Hud turned the camera off and then turned it back on. A lot of the scenes with spectacular special effects are done without very many cuts, and the film is filled with one-ers. That’s really impressive, again, considering those effects had to be rendered on amateur film that keeps jumping around.
If you get dizzy or queezy, make sure you’re plenty nourished before seeing this film. Anyone who gets car sick will probably come out of the theater with a bit of a head-ache, because there’s a lot of running and no steady-cam work, obviously. I was a little woozy myself by the end, but trust me, it’s worth it.
The movie does a surprisingly decent job of character development, despite the fact that it’s college kids who spend most of the movie running around the city dodging monster attacks. It’s a PG-13 film, so happily every time something bad happens, we don’t get Hud screaming the F word forty-five times behind the camera. There is a fair amount of more minor cursing, but it’s quite understandable considering the circumstances– it’s not distracting like it is in a lot of horror films. And unlike Blair Witch, the movie doesn’t spend half it’s time having it’s characters screaming at each other. They help each other out, they speculate about the monster, and they make humorous decisions like, okay we’re probably not going to survive, do we want to die underground or on the surface? Believe it or not, Cloverfield does have it’s funny places, despite it’s 24-like immediacy.
In last week’s Entertainment Weekly, JJ Abrams was quoted to say he didn’t know if viewers would think the film lives up to its hype, but he felt that was better than no one seeing it at all. The magazine said it had the danger of having the same problem Snakes on a Plane had, when the film just didn’t hold up to it’s massive advertising. However, I think the trailers for Cloverfield were smart. Abrams wanted it to be like it was when he was a kid, where you wouldn’t know about a movie until you saw the trailer, so in this first teaser trailer, there wasn’t even a title attached, just Abrams’ name. Then, the film was given a very neutral title. And in all the trailers, it was difficult to tell exactly what the film was about. All you know is, it’s a monster movie, the film looks really gritty for some reason, and Lady Liberty loses its head. If anything, I was afraid that would keep some people from seeing it because it was hard to know what you were in for. Honestly, I really only went because Abrams was producing it. However, the advertising seems to have worked. It’s number 1 at the box office and most of the reviewers weren’t disappointed with it. I certainly wasn’t.
Oh, and if you’re afraid that Lady Liberty losing its head is the big climax of the film and the trailers spoiled it (kind of like Independence Day with the White House exploding) don’t worry. That’s one of the very first things the monster does.
3.5 out of 4 points
LLAP
-Cap’n Logan
Tags: Cloverfield, monster movie