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So, strolling through NeverNeverLand, I discovered someone had uploaded a camcorder copy of Cloverfield. The Post-Modern Ouroborosness was irresistable, so I gave it a watch.
Two things: even on my laptop, the camera work gave me a headache, so if you are at all sensitive to motion sickness, just skip it. Second, you won't be missing anything you can't afford to miss.
Forget Harry Knowles and the rest of the Online Geek Chorus with their overwrought plaudits: Cloverfield is a monster movie and nothing more. Unless the thought of Godzilla brings you to orgasm, the strongest impression Cloverfield will leave on you is a desire for dramamine.
There are a couple of genuine chills (by which I mean two) and a gross out. But the movie takes far too long to get going for a film that only lasts 73 minutes (not including about nine minutes of credits) and the characters introduced in those 20 minutes are not particularly engaging nor is the plot - a group of friends make their way from Lower Manhattan to Midtown to rescue another friend from the wreckage of her building - particularly compelling or sensical. Throughout the course of the movie, it also requires people in authority to act in boneheaded and unrealistic ways, beginning with the idea that a civilian would be allowed to wander around a military forward operation base with a live camera.
A good horror movie, like The Terminator, puts the protagonists into a constant state of danger, while far too often in Cloverfield, our bunch of yuppie idiots are allowed to wander around unchecked. We are given glimpses of the monster marauding off in the distance but there's seldom a sense of imminent danger. And since my brain wasn't dealing with massive amounts of stress-based neurotransmitters, I had time to wonder about things like "if they're evacuating Manhattan, why aren't the NYPD patrolling the streets to make sure people actually leave?" and "Where is the NYFD? You'd think they'd be attempting to rescue people from this collapsed building while the army fights the monster off in the distance." Apparently, in the Cloverfield universe, there's no such thing as first responders or emergency plans.
Which brings me to the thing that's probably most annoying about Cloverfield - it takes an awful big set of balls to make a movie about a monster knocking over buildings in New York City in a version of reality where 9/11 and the World Trade Centre didn't happen. Although it obviously did because Cloverfield ransacks the library of indelible images from that day - white clouds of debris billowing through city streets, rains of paper, shell-shocked survivors painted white with with concrete dust and ash wandering the streets - but if the Cloverfield monster is meant to be a metaphor for 9/11 it fails.
Cloverfield seeks to recreate the experience of such on-the-spot recordings as the Zapruder film or the Rodney King video, not to mention the upteen thousand images of the 9/11 attacks. However, what makes these amateur records such compelling viewing is what we, the audience, know about their context. The images, while shocking in themselves, accrue weight and meaning through what we know about the events that came before and came after. No movie using the faux-witness style, and certainly not Cloverfield, can match those experiences. We know that what we're watching isn't real and the extremely limited first person perspective of Cloverfield actually makes it harder to get lost in the movie as we're constantly being reminded that what we're viewing is a construct. Without the dramatic impact of a sustained narrative or any information on the monster itself, it's hard to look at Cloverfield's appropriation of 9/11 imagery and New York setting as anything more than an unpleasantly opportunistic attempt at piggybacking a genre film on the lingering echoes of real-world tragedy.
There was never going to be a good time for the next disaster movie set in New York, not that I understand why the monster always has to eat New York anyway. Still, having pulled the pin on the idea, I wish that JJ Abrams and his surrogates Drew Goddard and Matt Reeves had made a better movie as well as one that had the guts to confront directly the event they so deliberately evoke.
Bottom line: worth a trip to the cinema for the Godzilla-lover, a rental for everyone else. And then only if you've got a strong stomach. For everyone else, I recommend Nextwave #1, same story, better dialogue.
Two things: even on my laptop, the camera work gave me a headache, so if you are at all sensitive to motion sickness, just skip it. Second, you won't be missing anything you can't afford to miss.
Forget Harry Knowles and the rest of the Online Geek Chorus with their overwrought plaudits: Cloverfield is a monster movie and nothing more. Unless the thought of Godzilla brings you to orgasm, the strongest impression Cloverfield will leave on you is a desire for dramamine.
There are a couple of genuine chills (by which I mean two) and a gross out. But the movie takes far too long to get going for a film that only lasts 73 minutes (not including about nine minutes of credits) and the characters introduced in those 20 minutes are not particularly engaging nor is the plot - a group of friends make their way from Lower Manhattan to Midtown to rescue another friend from the wreckage of her building - particularly compelling or sensical. Throughout the course of the movie, it also requires people in authority to act in boneheaded and unrealistic ways, beginning with the idea that a civilian would be allowed to wander around a military forward operation base with a live camera.
A good horror movie, like The Terminator, puts the protagonists into a constant state of danger, while far too often in Cloverfield, our bunch of yuppie idiots are allowed to wander around unchecked. We are given glimpses of the monster marauding off in the distance but there's seldom a sense of imminent danger. And since my brain wasn't dealing with massive amounts of stress-based neurotransmitters, I had time to wonder about things like "if they're evacuating Manhattan, why aren't the NYPD patrolling the streets to make sure people actually leave?" and "Where is the NYFD? You'd think they'd be attempting to rescue people from this collapsed building while the army fights the monster off in the distance." Apparently, in the Cloverfield universe, there's no such thing as first responders or emergency plans.
Which brings me to the thing that's probably most annoying about Cloverfield - it takes an awful big set of balls to make a movie about a monster knocking over buildings in New York City in a version of reality where 9/11 and the World Trade Centre didn't happen. Although it obviously did because Cloverfield ransacks the library of indelible images from that day - white clouds of debris billowing through city streets, rains of paper, shell-shocked survivors painted white with with concrete dust and ash wandering the streets - but if the Cloverfield monster is meant to be a metaphor for 9/11 it fails.
Cloverfield seeks to recreate the experience of such on-the-spot recordings as the Zapruder film or the Rodney King video, not to mention the upteen thousand images of the 9/11 attacks. However, what makes these amateur records such compelling viewing is what we, the audience, know about their context. The images, while shocking in themselves, accrue weight and meaning through what we know about the events that came before and came after. No movie using the faux-witness style, and certainly not Cloverfield, can match those experiences. We know that what we're watching isn't real and the extremely limited first person perspective of Cloverfield actually makes it harder to get lost in the movie as we're constantly being reminded that what we're viewing is a construct. Without the dramatic impact of a sustained narrative or any information on the monster itself, it's hard to look at Cloverfield's appropriation of 9/11 imagery and New York setting as anything more than an unpleasantly opportunistic attempt at piggybacking a genre film on the lingering echoes of real-world tragedy.
There was never going to be a good time for the next disaster movie set in New York, not that I understand why the monster always has to eat New York anyway. Still, having pulled the pin on the idea, I wish that JJ Abrams and his surrogates Drew Goddard and Matt Reeves had made a better movie as well as one that had the guts to confront directly the event they so deliberately evoke.
Bottom line: worth a trip to the cinema for the Godzilla-lover, a rental for everyone else. And then only if you've got a strong stomach. For everyone else, I recommend Nextwave #1, same story, better dialogue.
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