Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
1/19/07
One of the first brushes
any sci-fi geek gets with the 2nd level of movie viewing (themes, metaphors,
etc.) is when they realize that 1956's Godzilla, King of the Monsters
is not just a movie about a man in a giant rubber suit stomping his way
through Tokyo while Raymond Burr looks on in horror. To its' Japanese
filmmakers, Gojira was an attempt to examine in a fantasy context
their country's brush with the apocalyptic power of the atomic bomb.
Generations of guys in big rubber suits (and their CGI successors) trampled
cities with no such context, filing “city attacked by giant monster” under
“really cool thing” in our movie geek brains. As such, it's a big
surprise to discover that the J.J. Abrams-produced hype machine Cloverfield
is a totally back-to-basics monster mash, an attempt to examine in a fantasy
context our country's brush with the senseless large-scale slaughter of
the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The trailers may have gotten you buzzing
about how cool it would be to witness a monster attack from the victim's-eye
view, but Cloverfield is anything but cool: it's an intellectually
claustrophobic meditation on what it means to lose your life to a tidal
wave of destruction you can't hope to understand. Points for ambition,
and the movie does succeed more often than it fails. But unlike the
giant, inexplicable killing machine that drives its' plot, Cloverfield's
camcorder-POV stunt structure often bites off more than it can chew.
An opening title informs
us that what we are about to witness was recovered in “the former Central
Park”. Then, for the next 20-odd minutes we watch the banal goings-on
as Lily Ford (Jessica Lucas) plans a going-away party for Rob Hawkins (Michael
Stahl-David), the brother of her boyfriend Jason (Mike Vogel). She
wants Jason to use his brother's camcorder to “document” the evening, complete
with testimonials, but the slacker instead hands the camera off to Rob's
best friend Hud (T.J. Miller), who's more interested in filming Marlena
Diamond (Lizzy Caplan), a friend of a friend who barely knows the guest
of honor. For his part, Rob is torn up about his close friend Beth
(Odette Yustman), with whom things have gotten strained since they slept
together a couple weeks before. Beth comes to the party, but ends
up leaving in a huff, and just as Rob's friends are trying to talk him
into going after her, the city is shaken by what seems to be a huge earthquake.
Then come fireballs flying through the sky. The friends race out
into the street to witness a series of unthinkable sights: the flying
head of the Statue of Liberty lands in the streets, the Chrysler Building
collapses, and a gigantic leg can be seen dragging behind the nearby skyscrapers.
Hud just keeps filming as Rob gets a call from Beth, who's trapped in her
apartment and “can't move”. Wracked with guilt and the need to make
things right, he begins a march in the wrong direction, TOWARD the destruction
to save the woman he loves, while his friends tag along, and keep taping.
What lies at the center of
Midtown Manhattan is a creature unlike anything we've seen before (comparisons
to the beasts from The Mist are actually more apt
than those to Godzilla), one which “drops” miniature copies of itself
into the streets as it tears through the city eating everyone it can get
its' hands on. Against all odds, Cloverfield does an excellent
job putting the horror back into the giant monster attack with its' civilian's-eye
view of the destruction and death that seems a lot cooler in movies where
The Eaten are all extras. The misshapen, improbable nature of the
unnamed creature (which looks great) also helps to keep its' menace alien:
the movie never does explain where it came from or what it is. The
special effects are top-shelf across the board and do a great job of putting
us in the reality of a modern city being trampled by an inhuman beast.
If only the human characters had more pop. It's not so much that
they're unlikable as that they barely exist; all we really know is that
their concerns don't add up to a hill of beans against this crazy monster.
That keeps the actual suspense of the onslaught minimal despite its' horrific
nature.
Because of everything I've
just said, it's actually ironic that the thing that works best in the movie
involves the characters rather than the creature: Hud's tape of the
party and monster rampage is being recorded over footage Rob took of himself
and Beth a few fateful weeks before. From time to time, the tape
skips ahead after being shut off and we see a few moments of them in happier
times and it only gradually becomes clear exactly what we're looking at
and why it matters until a final line that puts a really resonant spin
on the entire enterprise. Who could ask Rob to have lived the last
few weeks like a giant monster was going to attack New York City?
And yet, when all cards are on the table, there's no doubt that's exactly
what he should have done. How strange that, thematically, Cloverfield
has a lot more in common with The Bucket List
than any Godzilla movie I can recall.
Odd for a movie so caught
up in being realistic that it takes a great deal of contrivance to keep
the wheels spinning. While I really got why Rob would feel like he
needed to risk death to save Beth, I can't for the life of me figure out
why his other friends (and Marlena, who barely knows any of them) tag along.
Yes, we are told that they too are friends, but we don't SEE it in a way
that's persuasive. Frankly, none of the bonds we witness at the opening
party seem like something people would risk their lives over. And
the way Hud films the events doesn't have the kind of authenticity the
camerawork in Cloverfield's kissing cousin The Blair Witch Project
did: I often couldn't imagine him choosing to point the camera in
the places he did given the situation he was in. A desire to keep
things “realistic” also prevents characters from talking about “monsters”
in a way that struck me as kinda hollow given the way we now process everything
in terms of the media. Even quick glimpses of national TV news reports
hesitate to refer to the creature in any way, and we all know how quick
reporters were to go to cinematic analogies on 9/11. The film feels
viscerally realistic, but when it opens its' mouth... not so much.
The acting is quite good,
especially given the limited nature of the characters. I particularly
liked Caplan, whose scenes hint at all manner of untapped depth in poor
wrong place/wrong time Marlena. Stahl-David and Yustman play their
relationship scenes very well, particularly toward the end. Miller
makes a funny comic doofus, and since many of the things Hud does can only
be explained by him being an idiot, that's a good thing. Ford and
Vogl's characters are pretty one-note, but they are convincingly menaced.
Across the board, I felt like I was watching people in real danger rather
than actors in a monster movie. Long-time Abrams collaborator Matt
Reeves does a great job staging the camcorder onslaught, and keeps his
cast in the moment even when their characters are left wanting. I've
always been a fan of writer Drew Goddard's TV work (jumping from Buffy
the Vampire Slayer to Angel to Alias and some of last
season's best episodes of Lost) and he deserves credit for the story's
bleak vision and the clever use of the two competing tapes, but I do wish
he'd given us better characters to spend 84 minutes with.
Cloverfield isn't
really anything like I was expecting (and I've been expecting hard
for months, ever since seeing that great teaser trailer before Transformers
last July), and it's hard to imagine what most moviegoers will make of
its' brand of apocalyptic what-ifing. But it is a memorable movie
experience, another to add to the currently popular wave of End of Days
sci-fi. The genre has always been called upon to give voice to our
darkest fears, and there's a lot of them to go around these days.
In the company of Children of Men or I
Am Legend, it's a minor effort, but fans of giant monsters may never
look at a rampaging guy in a rubber suit the same way again. |
