It's difficult to separate an evaluation of Cloverfield the movie from Cloverfield the viral marketing phenomenon, Cloverfield the latest capitalization on Lost's ur-absentee father J.J. Abrams's largely unearned reputation as a genre hitmaker (from where I'm sitting he's batting 1 for 4--Felicity?
Alias? MI:3?), Cloverfield the source of Harry Knowles's latest laughably hyperbolic panegryic. But I think it's worth doing so because Cloverfield the movie, like The Mist and I Am Legend before it, is an example of close-but-no-cigar survival horror worth investigating. Indeed, you could see those three films as sort of a not-quite-successful post-post-9/11 monster-movie trilogy, with this one displaying strengths and weaknesses of both its predecessors.

For example, it shares with The Mist some truly harrowing you-are-there camerawork. It's easy to dismiss the first-person construction of the film as, well, easy, and indeed this is being done hither and yon, but if it was such an obvious idea why had no one done it on this scale before? The technique works. It's immediate and intense, and great way to convey the disaster in a relatable fashion, not to mention parcel out the reveal of the monster in a deliciously slow build. And from a pragmatic standpoint, it saves on the CGI end of things.

Speaking of, it also shares with The Mist excellent, frightening, weird creature design. God only knows what that giant monster is supposed to be--it really doesn't look like anything, which besides being cool also reinforces the unresolved mystery of its origin. Even the little parasite-y critters, frequently the weak point of any genre movie's digital arsenal, are scary and convincing. (I especially liked their icky gobble-gobble noises.) Moreover there are no egregious moments like The Mist's opening tentacle attack to make you feel like you're watching Jar-Jar Binks on the rampage. And once again, it's nice to see non-humanoid monsters presented not only as physically frightening in the thriller fashion of Jurassic Park, but existentially frightening in the fashion of all great horror antagonists, from Pazuzu to Leatherface to Pinhead to Godzilla. Finally, unlike The Mist, the movie admirably avoids explanations of the beast from conveniently knowledgeable soldiers.

Meanwhile, Cloverfield shares I Am Legend's beautiful and terrible use of ruined New York City as a locus of horror. If anything Cloverfield pushes the 9/11 imagery even harder and further than IAL, and to memorable and disturbing effect. As I've mentioned before, quite a few times I think, I'm not one of these people who wants to deny filmmakers access to our era's defining trauma, and certainly not because they dare to use monsters in the process. In fact the moments that freaked me out the worst in this movie were all from the destruction of New York end of the spectrum rather than the monstrous one--the collapse of (I think?) the Woolworth Building, the wave of dust chasing our heroes into a convenience store, the lingering, disbelieving shot of the Statue of Liberty's severed head, the panic on the Brooklyn Bridge (I made that walk myself during the big blackout a few years back), the sight of a B-12 bomber dropping a payload on midtown Manhattan. It's terror, alright.

But also like I Am Legend, Cloverfield ends up unsure of itself, backing away from real horror--the horror of failure, impotence, death--and presenting the audience with a too-flattering portrait of the resilience of the human heart. Unfortunately, unlike the final-five-minutes foul-up that marred the earlier movie, Cloverfield makes this the heart of the whole affair: We follow a twentysomething guy and his friends on his valiant quest to rescue the girl he loves (with whom he had hardly spoken, for reasons unknown, following a magical one night stand and day at Coney Island the month before). The notion that in the face of a monstrous apocalypse we'd drop everything and in a living portrait of competence rescue our beloved is an extremely attractive ideal, but it's both soporific and sophomoric. (Literally--I'm pretty sure I wrote something that operated along similar lines in college.) It reduces other people to characters in your personal heroic saga, where you're the knight in shining armor and they're waiting to be rescued. The filmmakers never challenge our hero's blandishing view of himself in the slightest.

And in choosing the least challenging (to writer and audience alike) character arc possibly engendered by this genre, the filmmakers end up serving up an emotionally undercooked, flatlined bunch of protagonists, a fault it shares with The Mist and that film's unchanging archetypes. You don't get bored with these characters like you do with The Mist, since the action here is comparatively non-stop. (Unless you really just can't stand these yuppies, but I don't understand that hostility--these cats and kittens are basically everyone I know in New York, myself included.) But when the facile characterization does stand out, whoo boy, it's some grade-A government cheese. The cameraman's wisecracks, the goofy would-be heartstring-tugging reunion scene (when she woke up, a lot of people in the audience I was in laughed, and for good reason--it was laughable!), and most especially the film's final scene felt like an undergraduate's view of love amid tragedy, like Celine Dion might start singing "My Heart Will Go On" over the final credits. I'm not insisting on nihilism, mind you--some of the greatest apocalyptic survival-horror movies ever, the original Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later and Aliens among them, largely eschew the "no one learns anything, everybody dies" approach, to spectacular results. I am insisting on characters who don't confirm their--and our--first emotional impressions of how they will behave.

Did it live up to the hype? No. I don't know what could, aside from, like, a good Godfather sequel or The Hobbit or something. I feel a little resentful of being coaxed into caring as much about the movie as I did in fact--The Mist and I Am Legend avoided that level of manipulation, and good for them. I guess I'd say I'm glad I saw it, you should probably see it too if you're interested in the kinds of issues addressed by the movie, and like me you'll probably end up back at home, patiently waiting for another monster movie to deliver what this one and its predecessors promised.

Posted by Sean T. Collins at 5:18 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)