Note: I wrote this up and then realized it would be silly to add a FIFTH review to the main site, especially since I don’t have that much to say that’s different from Grady, The Visitor and Swarez, but here it is anyway; if nothing else, a possible springboard for further discussion.
I didn’t realize Cloverfield was a comedy!
Let’s take the good things first: Michael Giacchino composed a truly magnificent overture ("Roar!") that plays over the lengthy closing credits. The overture calls to mind all the great giant monster movies and blends into a seamless, toe-tapping whole. In short: loved it, would buy it.
But I have no desire to sit through the entire movie again, which is a shame because the basic premise sounded so compelling: “Godzilla attacks New York City in a post-9/11 environment, shot from the POV of a camcorder.” Indeed, two or three sequences hint at what might have been: confusion and panic as the monster invades the city; fleeing crowds on the Brooklyn Bridge; a terrifying surprise in a subway tunnel. Those few scenes are riveting in their intensity, and the handheld, wildly swaying photography actually adds to the unease.
Yet it only takes the opening 15 minutes to realize the premise itself has boxed the filmmakers into a dead end. The decision to tell the entire story from the POV of one camcorder sounds terrific, unless you’ve ever been subjected to your neighbor’s home movies—or watched much authentic YouTube footage. The camcorder is placed in the hands of someone who’s never used it before; the resulting footage is neither as horribly awful as you would expect from an untrained, first-time camera operator, but neither is it as good as a professional. Instead, it’s stuck somewhere in that nowhere land where highly skilled professional filmmakers pretend to be amateurs.
It only works in short bursts. Since the filmmakers appear to have been inspired by reality television shows, maybe they should have really studied a few instead of assuming that 90 minutes of jerky movements would suffice. The key on reality shows? Commercials and interview segments. They give the eye a break, and allow a wider range of perspective on what’s happening. Cloverfield simply mashes everything together. It’s carefully edited, of course, to cut out the “boring” parts, and that leads us to an even greater problem.
Everything has to happen in front of the camcorder.
Pardon the pun, but it’s a monstrous conceit that every key plot point is played out in front of the lens. Reality dictates that you can only put together a composite of an event from multiple cameras, but that would violate the “one camera, one POV” rule that the filmmakers set for themselves. Alas, that very conceit becomes an unstoppable force that undermines the entire movie.
The monster becomes some kind of media whore with an insane attraction to our amateur’s camera, which made me start to giggle near the end, especially as the very predictable coincidences piled up to, ultimately, truly ridiculous extremes. (I think someone gasped in horror behind me, so I had to restrain myself from laughing out loud. Always respect your fellow audience members.) Of course, of course, of course, I said to myself as each point was checked off the list.
In the end, Cloverfield is a gimmick. It’s a good, entertaining gimmick of a b-movie that will make a ton of money—the 5:05 pm first day screening was more filled than I’m accustomed to seeing at my neighborhood theater—but it’s still just a gimmick.
Still, it made me laugh, a few scenes were certifiably top-notch, and the overture was wonderful.
