Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008): USA

Reviewed by Richard Feilden. Viewed on iReel streaming.

cloverfieldOften films have elements whose sole purpose is to move the plot forward.  Legendary thriller director Alfred Hitchcock called them MacGuffins.  Think of the stolen money in Psycho, or the possible murder in Rear Window, which only serves to propel the relationship between James Stewart and Grace Kelly’s characters.  In Cloverfield, the MacGuffin is unfortunately far more interesting than the actual story and we end up focusing for far too much of the film on the relationships between six twenty-something friends, while something BIG tears New York apart.

The group in question is holding a party to celebrate the departure of Rob (Michael Stahl-David) to Japan to take up a job. Amongst the unnamed masses in the huge apartment in which they’ve gathered are Rob’s brother Jason (Mike Vogel) and his girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas), Rob’s best friend Hud (T.J. Miller), and Beth (Odette Yustman) and Marlena (Lizzy Caplan) who Rob and Hud have a crushes on respectively.  But, just as relationships begin to fray and the party begins to implode, the building is rocked by an explosion.  Rushing to the roof, the friends witness a giant creature, demolishing skyscrapers.  As they flee, they discover that one of their group is missing, and a rescue is launched…  

The main problem with Cloverfield is that it just hasn’t embraced the ‘creature-feature’ concept sufficiently.  Whereas Godzilla and King Kong made the monster the focus of the action, Cloverfield is closer to Alien, where the relationships between the people involved, and their reactions to the situation, form the backbone of the film.  The problem here is that the people involved just aren’t interesting or, generally speaking, even likable.  The first seventeen minutes of the film focus on the aforementioned party, something which could have been covered in five and which frankly had me bored to tears.  One of the characters is so stupid and, by virtue of the main conceit of the film which I’ll come to in a moment, apparently callous and cowardly, that you’ll be begging for him to meet a grisly end before the creature even appears!  For some reason the filmmakers have also decided to take an Alien-esque approach to the monster’s reveal, and have attempted to keep the monster mysterious, never letting the camera settle on it and allow it to become the spectacle that it should be.  While, in the days before VHS, Alien could get away with this relatively easily, this film seems to have been created in the full knowledge of perfect freeze-frame and so the monster is often so occluded that it loses its power to terrify. Imagine Godzilla hidden behind buildings and never really seen, or Kong’s climb up the Empire State Building shown only through snatched glimpses from a shaky camera down on the ground.  It just doesn’t work.

The other problem with the film is the ‘reality tv’ approach that the director chose to take.  The entire film is shown literally from the perspective of one or other of the characters, through the medium of a video camera that they carry and pass to each other through the entire film.  Claims of motion sickness from some who’ve seen the film aside, I have two issues with this.  The first is that the motivation to keep the camera rolling becomes increasingly strained as the film progresses.  George Romero’s Diary of the Dead, released around the same time as Cloverfield, used a similar trick, but it simply felt less forced than it does here.  The second problem is the passivity that it forces upon the character who is holding the camera.  Given that this character is the audience’s representative in the film, it frustrating to always be the person at the back of the group, or the person watching someone else do something interesting.  At one moment in the film the cameraman is saved by a character who is then herself attacked.  We then get to watch the other characters rush in to save her, while the cameraman obligingly records the events for posterity and, of course, our benefit.  When he later thanks her for saving him I wanted her to slap him across the face for subsequently abandoning her, but the script ignores this obvious character flaw as to draw attention to it would make the carrying of the camera all the more ridiculous.

Having said all of this, the film does have its moments.  When the monster does make it onto the screen, particularly as it clashes with the best that the military can muster, it does become, briefly, thrilling.   Skyscrapers fall, tanks are crushed and jets rain fire down from the sky, and at these moments you can see the film that this should have been.  You will also, as happens in all the best creature-features, find yourself rooting for the monster from time to time.  It is just unfortunate that this isn’t because you’ve become attached to the creature being harassed by mankind, but because you dislike the characters in the film so intensely.

Cloverfield is worth watching in these moments.  But its insistence on focusing on the relationships between the unlikable characters at the expense of mayhem, destruction and the creature spoils it for me.  It’s still worth watching though; just do yourself a favor by skipping the first quarter of an hour and diving straight into the fun stuff.

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Published:
06.16.09 / 10am
Category:
Films, Online Films