Very Brief Review

Cloverfield is a decent movie. If you go see it, you probably won't regret the money spent.


A Slightly Less Brief Review

I really couldn't care less about a genre than the "monster attacks!" genre, except possibly for the "this year our underdog sports concern is gonna take the championship!" genre or the "third tier superhero freshened with cutting edge CGI" genre.

I don't think Godzilla is neat-o mosquit-o in any iteration, and I never have.

I think the only monster movie on my DVD shelf is Ridley Scott's Alien from 1979. After seeing Cloverfield I'm pretty sure that DVD is on J. J. Abram's shelf, too, because the picture if rife with nods both subtle and overt. Scott was one of the first science-fiction directors to follow in the footsteps of Kubrick by attempting to dramatically heighten the credibility of the setting and the relatability of the characters in scifi. These motives seem to have been shared by the Cloverfield creators.

The idea, in case you haven't heard it, is to make the audience feel immersed by convincing them that the media they're watching is an authentic artifact, presented as recorded without professional dressing, capturing events in the midst of a remarkable situation. (A similar conceit was used in The Blair Witch Project but any further comparison between the films would be a stretch.)

The technique is effective to a point. The monster movie, which can at this point in history can contain few surprises, is given vivid new life and becomes enjoyable in a way that it probably hasn't been since it was brand new. The narrative style is the movie, to a great extent, so the tired old monster formula doesn't actually have to shoulder too much weight. It's really just there as scaffolding.

I say "up to a point" because, as much as I found the technique did indeed function as intended by putting me into the shoes of the characters, I didn't find the experience as emotionally stenuous as my first viewing of the Spielberg version of War of the Worlds (which employed similar narrative mechanisms while retaining the traditional omniscient camera, though shot in a loose, pseudo-actual camera style). I think I was somewhat detached because of the credibility of the conceit -- part of me could reason that if I was watching an anthentic recording, that must mean the events seen happened in the past: in other words, the survival of the characters was clearly not connected to my personal survival, as I was a voyeur of their existing document. In contrast, in War of the Worlds I was asked, in the more traditional way, to suspend my disbelief about where these images were coming from and just get caught up in the depicted events as if they were taking place in the present -- not a documentary, in other words, but a portal into some magic cinema space where unbelievable things are unfolding as we watch...a virtual present tense.

So, no matter what happens on screen in Cloverfield I know I didn't get my ass handed to me in New York. Fait accompli. A virtual past tense created, ironically, by a technique that reinforces the immediacy of the action and the reality of the people it's happening to.

That being said, it was a very fun movie to watch. When the lights came up Littlestar and I both had mild headaches, but we chased them away with drinks. I felt much dizzier coming out of The Blair Witch Project, and mildly ill. Cloverfield is much easier to watch, but at points the hand-held smears of nothingness can be trying to even the most MTV-jaded media input processing engine.

I'm glad they didn't overplay their hand with the monster. It's a nice design, but we don't ever get to see it very clearly. I think they struck a good balance there.

The exposition is extremely minimal. I mean, not like Darren Aronofsky minimal, but still pretty fucking minimal. That also plays to my tastes, so I really enjoyed being left largely in the dark. The audience only knows what the man on the street in an exploding New York knows, and it's only bits and pieces. There is no gay information-explanation payoff, and that's a very good thing even if it does make the mouth-breathers crinkle their witto brows in confusion.

"So, like, where'd the monster come from?"

We're never told. Who cares? That kind of pre-production navel-gazing is entirely beside the point. The creators keep the backstory out of the movie, I believe in an effort to keep our suspension of disbelief focused on the elements important in the moment: it's enough that we're scared shitless because a monster is smashing the city. That's the only improbable thing we're really asked to entertain. We're not taxed by having to hear mumbo-jumbo about a secret deep sea ecosystem or hostile oxygen-breathers from beyond the Moon.

The street-level visual effects (smashing, glimpses of monster, fallen infrastructure) are absolutely seamless. I was never torn out of the movie space by stunt CGI models who look like dolls or debris that smacks of simulated particle behaviour. The compositing is bang on -- motion matching, lighting integration, optical effects -- really, really invisible. Nice.

The roiling clouds of debris and shredded office papers at one point really took me back to watching the live coverage of the World Trade Center collapse. I'm pretty sure that if I had been in Manhattan on that day I would give Cloverfield a pass. The screaming crowds, the unbelievable scale of the devastation, the uncertainty and powerlessness -- it's all got to put you right back there on September 11th.

It's not a heavy movie. It's a piece of fluff, but it's one of the most well executed pieces of fluff I've seen in a very long time.

I give it four out of five cheeseburgers.