Cloverfield

I had hoped to see Cloverfield in the theater back in January when it first came out but never got around to it. So while I was in Blockbuster the other day looking for another film I was using in a message at youth group I picked it up. I can't remember where, but I had been hearing some discouraging things about Cloverfield since it came out. Regardless of what people had been saying I was going to give it a shot, not the least bit because J.J. Abrams was involved in the project.

I loved it. And in retrospect I'm actually glad I had heard some negative reviews because I saw it without it having been over-hyped. To grossly oversimplify, Cloverfield is somewhere between Blair Witch and Godzilla. Some kind of creatures begin to attack Manhattan but we see everything from the point of view of a hand-held camcorder manned by one of the main characters. To paraphrase the filmmakers, there's this huge disaster happening on an enormous scale but we're looking at it through a soda straw. While the camera work made some moviegoers sick... literally, I found that it drew me right into a familiar (and by now, predictably boring) storyline - the disaster movie. The creative perspective given to this storyline in effect redefined the boundaries of a disaster movie and the result is anything but campy.

[spoilers ahead] Cloverfield just entirely abandons many of the staples of the disaster film. We don't get to sit in on any high-level military meetings on how to kill off the monsters. We don't get to see the the monsters arrive and brush by unsuspecting people before it all hits the fan, we don't really even see the "end" of the whole drama. Instead we simply get the hand-held camera view of what happens to 4 friends in the midst of this whole disaster. We know as much as they know. We are as in the dark as they are. There is no third person narrative, we experience the entire film from the first person point of view. As a horror technique I found this extremely effective because the anxiety that accompanies ignorance is so much greater than the fear from a well framed close up of some really well done digital creature. For much of the film we are really very ignorant of what is really happening. There is the tidbit of info from the random solider, but for the most part we walk through the film in the dark with the main characters.

The opening credits set the premise that the film we are watching isn't a film, it's just a tape that was found in the wreckage. There's no editing, there's no commentary, we're just going to watch what was on this tape. This would seem like it would significantly limit the ability to do any character development or deeper storytelling. However the filmmakers used the "this is just a tape" premise to their advantage in a move of brilliance. We find out pretty early on in the film that our videographer, Hud, didn't use a new tape, but he's taping over a pretty special video his best friend and our protagonist, Rob, had taken of a day he spent with longtime friend, Lily, who for that one day, became something more. Lily is trapped in an apartment and Rob, against all common sense is going in after her. We are able to get a little backstory and character development from some of the gaps between Hud's filming where the original tape isn't recorded over. Genius.

Labels: Film