Cloverfield (2008)-Norbert Brown
Cloverfield (2008)
By Norbert Brown
You’re on a street in lower Manhattan…
There’s been an earthquake of some sort, the lights went out and came back on, and there’s a panic on the streets that looks and feels eerily like the first moments after the towers were hit on 9/11.
Suddenly, the head of the Statue of Liberty falls from the sky, into the street in front of you. So the first thing you do is take out your camera phone to get a shot of it, right?
So the makers of Cloverfield would have us believe. And they may not be too far from right. In this 85-minute, nausea-inspiring shocker, more questions are asked than are answered. While many of the questions are in the nature of “what the hell is that thing?” and “what the hell is happening to these people?” and “how did 59th Street get so close to SoHo?,” questions are also raised about the place of technology in our lives today, the ability of humans to respond to extreme levels of stress and what the government would do if an alien attack suddenly destroyed Manhattan.
In the case of the last question, the answer seems to be, “change the name of Central Park to Cloverfield, and look at any videotapes found lying around.” The entire film is, in fact, one of these found tapes. This may be a spoiler, but none the less you should know that there is no pre-amble or post-script that explains the things the characters see or the things that happen to them: when you go to this movie you are watching a tape that begins at a party for a guy who’s leaving to go live in Japan the next day, (Japan: the land of massive, city-crushing monsters. Nice ironic touch.), and turns into a moment-by-moment documentary of a small group of friends trying to survive an unsurvivable attack by a massive, city-crushing monster. Or maybe several monsters. Or maybe one big monster and its vicious little lobster-like babies. Not sure exactly – but it’s way creepy.
This accidental documentary premise is the movie’s strength, and also its weakness. The jiggling camera, the occasional flashes of a sunny day-trip to Coney Island that’s being taped over on this day of Armageddon – these add a certain verisimilitude to the movie. And everyday life is documented along with its sudden upheaval. As a matter of fact, this may be the one film I’ve seen that most thoroughly documents the role of cell phones in the lives of Americans today: In addition to the constant picture-taking, the plot turns at key points on a voice mail, a spotty connection and a failing cell battery. And a truly heart-rending scene in which a son tells his mother of his brother’s death in the mayhem happens via cell phone in an abandoned subway station.
However, as was the case in Cloverfield’s fake cinema verite ancestor, The Blair Witch Project, the amateur-found-tape devise is sometimes as intrusive as it is enlightening. (In that earlier film I practically shouted at the screen, “What did they do – pack 5,000 camera batteries?” But I’m a more patient man now.) The trouble with this concept is that you have to fit it around all the information and action that needs to go into the movie. And the reality is, there are certain times when nobody in his right mind would have the camera running. In the case of Cloverfield, I’d probably have dropped the camera the moment I stepped out of the creepy dark subway tunnels. Oh – and in the tunnels – there’s a moment when the scary, unidentifiable noises around the group inspire one guy to say to the other, “turn on the night vision.”
What?? Turn on the night vision?? This camera has night vision? And you’re not USING it to walk through dark subway tunnels? Are you nuts? And you’re burning battery ROLLING TAPE?? These are the thoughts that went through my mind before the night vision revealed, well, bad things. And then I just started screaming. There were a couple of other times that I found myself distracted by the rolling camera – like when the heroes are trying to cross a partially-collapsed roof, which is leaning at about a 45 degree angle against another building. I kept thinking, “hmm… document what’s happening… or avoid falling 57 stories to your death… tough choice.”
But these were relatively minor flaws, as was a little bit of playing fast-and-loose with Manhattan geography. Overall, Cloverfield works: its compactness balances the intensity of the style, and the monster of unknown origin is horrifying and mysterious, with unfathomable scale and the strange aesthetics of a Salvador Dali nightmare. The not-knowing – the sense of being trapped in a shifting reality in which the rules you routinely live by simply don’t apply – is the scary core of this movie. And it’s a nice touch that we end up knowing no more than the characters themselves, even as we walk out of the theater. Are these monsters from outer space, or from the bottom of the ocean? Have they spontaneously risen from New York Harbor? What do they want? This makes them truly frightening: you can’t explain them, so you can’t explain them away.
Copyright C. 2008 Norbert Brown