Writer: Drew Goddard
Director: Matt Reeves
Some Thing Has Found Us
Monster movies make a lot of people tremble, but not in a good way – the genre instantly brings to mind thoughts rubber suited actors stamping on unconvincing models of Tokyo in an incomprehensible plot. Hollywood versions such as the 1998 remake of Godzilla have done little to improve the genre’s reputation. So making Cloverfield was a brave move. The involvement of J.J.Abrams and Drew Goddard of Lost gave it a fighting chance at the box office – but does the film work and did it deserve the hype?
Cloverfield’s gimmick, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is that it’s filmed in the first person faux cinema verite style most well known in popular cinema from The Blair Witch Project. We see the whole thing from the point of view of a camera carried by one of the characters – it’s found footage. The story begins at a going away party being given for a guy moving abroad to a new job – in Tokyo, nice touch. Through the old device of everyone saying a few words wedding-video style we’re introduced to the main characters. It’s not a promising start – although they aren’t as stupid as those in Blair Witch, the characters are just as tedious and annoying.
Fortunately disaster strikes not a moment too soon. Electricity goes out, there are bangs and crashes and ‘It’ has arrived.
From then on we’re racing around the city with the characters, seeing the events unfold from the view of the camera. This certainly works effectively to give sense of what the situation would really feel like. One little problem is that the jerky, rapidly moving shots make the carefully framed product placement even more blatantly obvious.
Initially all this works really well. There’s a great deal of tension and we’re given gradually more revealing glimpses of the creature and its lifestyle. In the spirit of the old incomprehensible Japanese films, we never truly know what’s going on – at one point I thought it was going to turn into a zombie movie!
I’m normally a great believer that what you don’t see can be scariest of all. Unfortunately Cloverfield’s strict adherence to the single person perspective means that we never really find out anything about the bigger picture. We get a few drips of information from radio and TV broadcasts and – not very believably – a talkative military officer, yet we never really know anything.
Yes this is realistic from the victim’s eye view but it’s also unsatisfying. I don’t always need to be spoon fed all the answers but I do like to know something. The main characters weren’t interesting or engaging enough for me to become emotionally involved with them, I just felt I was being deprived of the real story. I can’t really blame the actors for this – not much acting was required – it’s just that the way the characters were written and the limited scope we had for getting to know them meant I really didn’t care whether or not they became monster fodder.
So the interest and originality of the method soon wore off as the lack of story became apparent. Fortunately Cloverfield is one of those rare modern films that knows when to stop – at a mere 85 minutes the thrill factor just about carried it. Had it been much longer it would have become very tedious indeed.
So yes, Cloverfield just about works, but no it doesn’t deserve the hype. It’s an interesting oddity, worth seeing, but not a classic. It certainly doesn’t merit a sequel.