Cloverfield

"This is gonna be important. People are gonna watch this."

Cloverfield is a tricky beast of a monster movie — unremittingly intense for 80 grueling minutes, it leaves viewers in the dust. It wasn’t until I had a few seconds to take a breath and register the film that I realized that it doesn’t quite work, and that its intensity lacked an emotional connection. Had Cloverfield been done right, delivering on all the potential for horror and tragedy that the brilliant premise contained, I would have left the theater emotionally drained. Instead I felt merely dizzy.

The heartbreaking thing is that Cloverfield clearly understands the genre it’s playing in, and often delivers on the promise of its “Blair Witch meets Godzilla” conceit. Indeed, it does something very interesting to the monster movie: it sets the action on a small scale, following a set of ordinary characters around as they try to save themselves, while occasionally giving us hints of the big picture. In theory, the big picture becomes terrifying precisely because it invades the film’s otherwise comfortable narrow focus. And when both perspectives are awash in confusion and chaos, the result is — or can be — even more unsettling.

When the film takes a broader view, it works, unequivocally. Its vision of a New York City attacked without warning by an unspeakable abomination, the destruction glimpsed from a distance at first and met with as much curiosity as horror, is scary because it’s so believable, or at least conceivable — not the monster itself, of course, but the whisperings of another terrorist attack, the crowds gathered on the rooftops watching the skyline explode, the wave of fear that eventually hits. Cloverfield doesn’t ask how much blood it can spill or how many times it can startle the audience with a sudden special effect or musical cue; it asks what an American city invaded by something enormous, malevolent and alive would look and sound like. And in terms of making a monster movie that has a real effect, that’s undeniably the right question.

I relished every glimpse of that big picture — the sight of a military-led mass evacuation, for example, or fighter planes suddenly whizzing by overhead, or news footage trying to make sense of the madness. I liked it so much that I started to ignore the small-scale stuff — the twentysomething friends running around with a camcorder who are supposed to be the focus of the film, and almost literally our eyes and ears. None of it engaged me. I stopped paying attention to the sarcastic, supposedly funny banter (most of it coming from the guy behind the camera who decides to document the invasion for posterity) almost entirely. Life and death decisions were made — the putative protagonist at one point decides to skip a helicopter evacuation to go back to midtown and try to rescue his girlfriend, and his companions follow him — but I was almost too busy scanning the sides of the frame for another explosion or glimpse of the creature to notice. Big emotional moments, ones that should have turned me into an emotional wreck (e.g. a phone call to mom while barricaded in a subway station, telling her that one of her sons has been killed), don’t register at all. Occasional (and improbable, given the “found footage” format of the film) sunny flashbacks to better days are little more than distractions.

I think I can crystallize the problem this way: Cloverfield is dead on in its depiction of a monster invading downtown Manhattan, but almost completely ineffectual in portraying the characters meant to give us an intimate view of same. The film does big, but it does not do small. And for it to really work — to leave us shaken emotionally as well as physically, to have the impact of a great movie rather than a great theme park ride — it needed to do both.

Cloverfield is still pretty scary, worth the trip and maybe even the anticipation created by its brilliant marketing. The monster looks great, though one aspect of its physiology seemed shoehorned in to provide a few hollow jumps in the middle of the film. It’s a hell of a visceral experience — but it’s a purely visceral experience, apparently to the point of causing some viewers to vomit. Unless you’re one of those unfortunate few, you’ll soon forget the details. The Blair Witch Project is mostly a punch line these days, but I still remember its justly famous “I am so sorry” scene like I saw it yesterday.

-- Eugene Novikov

Released:	2008
Starring:	T.J. Miller, Lizzy Kaplan, Jessica Lucas, Michael Stahl-David, Mike Vogel
Directed by:	Matt Reeves
Rated:	PG-13