Cloverfield: Effective, if Handicapped

One big and ultimately irrelevant question I have about Matt Reeves's cult classic found-footage monster movie Cloverfield is, how in the world did these people not drop their camera while filming the unceremonious destruction of New York? I hope my other questions and observations ring more true and appropriate than that, but it's hard not to notice the cameraman's iron grip. This is a movie less about something that happens and more about one person's lived experience of it, a movie so devoted to the point of view of the man holding the camera that I was startled by actually seeing his face for the first time, about an hour into the runtime. Cloverfield isn't a perfect movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it does something special by taking city-destroying monsters, something I'm sure we've each seen a hundred times over, and forcing us to experience them instead. It has big monsters in it, little monsters in it, explosions, soldiers, tanks, and fighter jets, every familiar puzzle piece of a mindless summer blockbuster. And yet, it does something extremely special by forcing us to watch the destruction of an American city, not from a God's-eye view, but rather from on the ground, in the shoes of poor Rob Hawkins and his friends who only wanted to throw a good going-away party. This is a movie both elevated and limited by its found-footage perspective, and though its runtime is short on paper, you will feel every second of this movie, in ways both good and bad. Cloverfield is the longest and possibly the only 85-minute movie I have ever watched.

On paper, Rob and his camcorder are motivated by love and a hint of guilt over the mismanagement of his will-they-won't-they with a girl named Beth, but one thing I appreciate about this movie is its realization that, in a found-footage film, pure survival is often motivation enough for anyone. Nevertheless, hints of humanity sprinkled throughout are a major part of what gives this particular example its enduring appeal. Cloverfield is a commodity of the past. Found-footage movies have largely gone the way of the dinosaur, but this specific instance has managed to maintain an audience that most other movies like it haven't. It helps that this is one of the movies that popularized the trend in the first place, rather than going with the flow. And when you're willing to look past the collective and frustrating legacy of the many movies that copied it, Cloverfield really did do something special.

As something of a salt-spattered disclaimer, this movie is worth seeing simply for its spectacle. Still, in more ways than one, the found-footage format limits the depth of its characters, and the large cast doesn't help matters, either. Cloverfield is only able to catch people in the moment, to observe them rather than actually generate empathy for them in ways that more conventional movies don't struggle as much to do. I understand perfectly that empathy isn't the point of this movie, but what is? The only other logical explanation is that this movie is employing the found-footage technique for the sake of following a trend. Though watching it is a neat experience, Cloverfield makes a lot of unusual and even unnecessary sacrifices for the sake of its pitch-line premise, something the smaller cast and less crowded setting of the infamous The Blair Witch Project, likely my favorite found footage movie, didn't have to worry about. Perhaps it's unfair of me to criticize the shallow characterization of a film aiming primarily for sheer spectacle, but knowing about Matt Reeves's usual emphasis on character development raised my hopes in the wrong way.

Still, even if the found footage doesn't do much for the likability or charisma of anyone in this movie, which is a bigger and more unwieldy part of Cloverfield than is helpful, rarely have I seen a monster movie this intense. The shaky, helpless handheld footage amps up this extraterrestrial attack to an intensity of eleven, with the noticeable lack of any background score really putting its back into enhancing the illusion that what we're seeing on the screen is somehow real. This is a movie shot from the ground level, so outside of a few helicopter rides, we're not up above in the sky watching an angry glob of computer graphics tear apart New York. Instead, we're subjected to this attack from below, just like we theoretically would be in real life. At its best, Cloverfield is chaotic and frightening enough to make you feel absolutely helpless, both because of the monsters and also because of our society's reaction to them. We're not just shown monster chaos. Looting and other signs of a city in collapse are rampant here. Cloverfield doesn't just pay attention to the monsters; it wisely considers the reactions of everyone else in the city, too, adding a layer of legitimacy to the fantastically illegitimate.

This movie doesn't just work as a large-scale, skyscraper-toppling spectacle, either. Cloverfield also finds a gnarly suspense lurking in the small, underground corridors of New York, where helpless civilians have taken shelter from the unfolding carnage. One such scene of suspense features our main group of survivors trying to escape a horde of smaller creatures in the darkness of an underground subway system, and it's startling, more startling than I'm used to a spectacle-driven monster movie being. This movie is an obvious riff on stories that have walked back and forth over well-trod thematic ground, but it does something special that these movies haven't been able to do for a long time: it makes giant monsters scary again.

This movie may lack a main character presence, or really the presence of any character at all. Reeves and his crew are clearly having too much fun letting their monsters rampage through the city. And won't someone please explain to me why a movie made by a director known for his eye for empathy is so clinical instead? Still, Cloverfield makes up for all of this by effectively portraying for us what an attack by a giant monster would be like from the perspective of someone as helpless as a bunch of people who only wanted to throw a good going-away party. If someone who resembles a flesh-and-blood human being is frightened, that helps us be frightened, too. Cloverfield is an awesome spectacle to witness, but it can also be scary in a way that makes you wonder why other monster movies very often aren't.

Cloverfield - 7/10

Revelation 13:1-10