{"id":4657,"date":"2009-06-16T10:33:30","date_gmt":"2009-06-16T18:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=4657"},"modified":"2009-06-19T16:49:19","modified_gmt":"2009-06-20T00:49:19","slug":"cloverfield-matt-reeves-2008-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=4657","title":{"rendered":"Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008): USA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Richard Feilden<\/a>. Viewed on iReel streaming.<\/p>\n

\"cloverfield\"Often films have elements whose sole purpose is to move the plot forward.\u00a0 Legendary thriller director Alfred Hitchcock called them MacGuffins.\u00a0 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\u2019s characters.\u00a0 In Cloverfield<\/em><\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve gathered are Rob\u2019s brother Jason (Mike Vogel) and his girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas), Rob\u2019s best friend Hud (T.J. Miller), and Beth (Odette Yustman) and Marlena (Lizzy Caplan) who Rob and Hud have a crushes on respectively.\u00a0 But, just as relationships begin to fray and the party begins to implode, the building is rocked by an explosion.\u00a0 Rushing to the roof, the friends witness a giant creature, demolishing skyscrapers.\u00a0 As they flee, they discover that one of their group is missing, and a rescue is launched\u2026 \u00a0<\/p>\n

The main problem with Cloverfield is that it just hasn\u2019t embraced the \u2018creature-feature\u2019 concept sufficiently.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The problem here is that the people involved just aren\u2019t interesting or, generally speaking, even likable.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 One of the characters is so stupid and, by virtue of the main conceit of the film which I\u2019ll come to in a moment, apparently callous and cowardly, that you\u2019ll be begging for him to meet a grisly end before the creature even appears!\u00a0 For some reason the filmmakers have also decided to take an Alien-esque approach to the monster\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s climb up the Empire State Building shown only through snatched glimpses from a shaky camera down on the ground.\u00a0 It just doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

The other problem with the film is the \u2018reality tv\u2019 approach that the director chose to take.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Claims of motion sickness from some who\u2019ve seen the film aside, I have two issues with this.\u00a0 The first is that the motivation to keep the camera rolling becomes increasingly strained as the film progresses.\u00a0 George Romero\u2019s 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.\u00a0 The second problem is the passivity that it forces upon the character who is holding the camera.\u00a0 Given that this character is the audience\u2019s 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.\u00a0 At one moment in the film the cameraman is saved by a character who is then herself attacked.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Having said all of this, the film does have its moments.\u00a0 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. \u00a0\u00a0Skyscrapers 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.\u00a0 You will also, as happens in all the best creature-features, find yourself rooting for the monster from time to time.\u00a0 It is just unfortunate that this isn\u2019t because you\u2019ve become attached to the creature being harassed by mankind, but because you dislike the characters in the film so intensely.<\/p>\n

Cloverfield is worth watching in these moments.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It\u2019s still worth watching though; just do yourself a favor by skipping the first quarter of an hour and diving straight into the fun stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Richard Feilden. Viewed on iReel streaming. Often films have elements whose sole purpose is to move the plot forward.\u00a0 Legendary thriller director Alfred Hitchcock called them MacGuffins.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films","category-online-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}