Film and Felt

Armed to the teeth with an ingenious marketing campaign that sent internet geeks everywhere scrambling to their keyboards months ago, the ambitious Cloverfield is only moderately successful as a monster movie, but extremely provocative in many other ways. In a certain respect, that represents a major step forward for J.J. Abrams, the creator of Lost (superb) and Alias (hokey) whose fondness for sprawling cockteases that don’t always culminate in satisfactory payoffs threatened to make him a flash-in-the-pan, one-trick pony if Cloverfield failed to impress after all the internet forum banter and endless theorizing. It’s unfortunate that many of those fanboys may come away disappointed: when the identity of the monster is finally revealed, it’s fairly anti-climactic and unspectacular (though some of the carnage it causes is pretty cool). But, funny thing: it really doesn’t matter. Like the original Godzilla (1954), Cloverfield is about far more than cheap thrills and ruckus.

The movie begins with fragmented footage of longtime friends Rob (Michael Stahl-David) and Beth (Odette Yustman) enjoying a transcendent day delectably tinged with optimism & romance; strawberries in bed, amusement parks, the works. Suddenly, we’re transported to a packed farewell party for Rob, who’s about to move to Japan—not coincidentally Godzilla’s birthplace—for a much anticipated business promotion. As the various guests, including his brother Jason (Mike Vogel), future sister-in-law Lily (Jessica Ford), and depressed hipster buddy Marlena (Lizzy Caplan) record goodbye testimonials—filmed by Hud (T.J. Miller) who, we learn, is clumsily recording over Rob’s cherished memories—Beth arrives with hot date in tow, has it out with Rob, and leaves soon after; apparently, their path to happiness has hit a slew of speed bumps, not the least of which is Rob’s impending exit from America. As Rob stews and ponders, the room begins to shake, the party dashes to the roof to see what’s happening, and Cloverfield truly begins: the remainder of the movie is a nonstop scramble through the streets, subways, and sewers of the Big Apple—dutifully recorded by Hud because, as he says, “people need to know what went down”—where pandemonium has engulfed everything as a mysterious creature rips the city apart. Occasionally, though, flashes of Rob and Beth’s magical day reemerge, salvaged by Hud’s technical mediocrity to give us a brief glimpse of happiness before being plunged back into the chaos.

I haven’t read many other reviews of Cloverfield yet, but I’m willing to wager that many of the dissenters will whine about the “9/11 parallels” and the accompanying lack of subtlety. Well, they’re not just parallels; seeing the severed head of the Statue of Liberty crash on to the street is a flat-out warning that 9/11 could easily just be the tip of the iceberg if the USA continues along its current path. If There Will Be Blood blasts Capitalism and Fundamentalism by bashing the far-too-frequently-muddled union of Church and State, Cloverfield takes on war-mongering and its potential consequences with frightening force. Monuments like the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers are supposed to represent all that’s great about America. Seeing them fall, both in reality and onscreen, shakes a part of us that doesn’t want to be disturbed. It speaks to a vulnerability that so often seems far, far away, especially to today’s You Tube-crazed generation. Seeing a driverless horse & carriage trot the darkened streets (perhaps Cloverfield’s most poetic sequence) or a badly damaged 45-story luxury high-rise barely clinging to its life reinforce these fragile emotions even more. Cloverfield also raises many frightening concerns about America’s readiness to deal with a large-scale catastrophe. As the monster wreaks its havoc, the military rapidly mobilizes and triage stations pop up to take care of the wounded. Are we really confident that our Government would act with such meticulous efficiency after the inept way Hurricane Katrina was handled?

As Cloverfield is all shot from a first person perspective, every action sequence is seen through the eyes of humans. There are no close-ups of the monster, no glorification of the damage that it’s causing. When someone is injured or something destroyed, we see people frantically running, screaming, reacting. I’ve seen some quibbles about the “stupidity” of the main characters’ decisions, but that seems like nitpicking of the highest order to me; in crisis mode, decisions don’t come from any logical part of the brain, and let’s be honest, how much better do the streets sound than the subway tracks? Pick your poison…

In a traditional sense, the subplot between Rob and Beth is pretty sappy; indeed, it irked me when I left the theater. But as I thought about it, their love epitomizes a lot of what Cloverfield is all about. Rob may have blown Beth off, and Beth may have shown up at his party with another dude on her arm out of petty spite. But when push comes to shove, the deepest and truest emotions well up at crunch time, and that’s certainly the case here. The occasional spliced montages of their purest moments back up the legitimacy of their feelings.

Oh yeah, the monster. I know a lot of you really couldn’t care less about all the nonsense I’ve spewed so far, and just want to know how badass Cloverfield is. In that respect, I think it’s merely decent. Multiple sequences bear too strong a resemblance to previous films for my tastes, and the actual monster is barely seen (it has maybe five minutes of total screen time). Hell, it’s closer to Nintendo’s RAMPAGE than any classic movie monster you can think of. But that’s okay, because Cloverfield still pulsates with excitement, and hey, we don’t need the creature itself to be particularly special when the fear of the creature keeps our senses plenty perky. And in the end, Cloverfield is a “monster movie” in the same way Dawn of the Dead is “a dumb zombie movie.” Which is to say hardly at all: Romero’s Dead trilogy slyly delves into social issues aplenty, and with Cloverfield, Abrams has done much of the same. This isn’t Spiderman, where the overt 9/11 symbolism (”you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!”) was offensive, gratuitous, and wholly irritating. Cloverfield has something to say, and it shouldn’t be dismissed without some real thought.

RATING: pro (+)