Cloverfield (2008)

Rating:
Director: Matt Reeves
Starring: Michael Stahl-David, Mike Vogel, Odette Yustman, Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, T.J. Miller

Cloverfield is a well-made movie that tries to shake something new out of very familiar tropes. It sets up two difficult filmmaking challenges that are fully met, and two days after the screening, my nausea has almost passed.

The conceit here is that, as with Blair Witch Project, this movie is meant to look like the unaltered contents of a single cheap handheld video camera, in this case catching a handful of stylin’ 20-somethings running pell mell through a Manhattan under attack on a Lovecraftian or Wellsian/Wellesian level. And like Blair*, Cloverfield is so predominantly spastic in its camerawork that there’s the very real chance it’ll make a viewer sick. I felt eyestrain and such pronounced nausea that I could only look at the screen for a second or two at a time for more than half the film—and I’ve never gotten ill from a roller coaster, never been seasick. So weigh your own stomach strength before plunking down your ten bucks.

The film is written by Drew Goddard, a veteran of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alias and Lost, and Goddard sets himself up quite a story problem. The idea here is that a handful of characters get caught up in the sudden and massive destruction of New York City, but they’re just bystanders. They didn’t cause or discover the problem, and their story ends before it’s solved, if it ever will be. This would tend to guarantee that conventional aspects of a satisfying story won’t be here: Easy cause and effect? Nope. A hero who solves the problem, or even fails to solve it? Well, none of our characters are even meant to confront the problem. A happy ending? Hell, technically, there isn’t any ending here, in terms of the apparent bigger story. So how come this doesn’t suck?

Goddard weaves into the unfolding disaster epic a more personal story, a bit of a character thing, and by resolving that, we can leave the epic disaster in progress and still feel good. How many films about World War II end before the war does? Exactly. However, while the script is an excellent piece of craft for that reason, if you look too closely, the little story within the disaster is nothing very special, and it and the youthful cast both could’ve been something left behind at Dawson’s Creek or The OC when either of those shows shut down. The story is, are the characters going to die, and if so, are they going to die before they complete their other goal (the one that’s not just staying alive)? If you’re up for the chase, the story moves briskly, and is funnier, in a TV way, than you’d expect.

The other challenge was on the visual side. On the one hand, this thing is a giant special-effects extravaganza with massive destruction—of New York, no less, and real-world massive destruction in New York has been permanently burned into our psyches. On the other, it has to look like it was all shot with a tiny, retail video camera mostly held by a well-meaning moron running around in blind panic. Also, you have to edit the thing—presumably our in-story cameraman is just turning the camera on and off a lot, or perhaps some parts of the digital video have been lost—so that it seems real, but with scenes not dragging on the way home videos, even of crises, almost always do. Director Matt Reeves manages that trick nicely.

The actors play their parts well, if not memorably—the camera’s shaking so much, I doubt two-thirds of the audience could pick cast members out of a lineup, and there’s nothing here you could call character development. They run, they cry, they get really scared and perplexed, they get all mussed up.

[Aside: I couldn't help thinking what an audacious move it would be, next time a Godzilla-sized special effects summer film comes out, with its usual focus on heroes and villains and solutions, to release with it a film like Cloverfield, existing in the margins and showing you the little people being crushed while monsters and military and barrel-chested heroes fight their epic fights.]

In the end, Cloverfield is a tight, smart take on a very familiar genre, dressed up in flashy clothes. It’s not Alien-level horror or Aliens-level action, but if you ever wished giant monsters would destroy the entire lineup of the CW network, this is your movie. If you go to the theater with January-level expectations and a pocketful of Dramamine, you ought to have a good time. Or you might still throw up in your popcorn bucket.

* I never saw Blair Witch Project, actually. If I had, maybe I’d have known I wouldn’t be able to stomach this one.