Cloverfield (2008)

Filed Under BBT, New York, Soylent Screen, Jef Taylor, hideous amphibians

 

 

BBT critic Jef Taylor braves the shakycam for your pleasure!

 

Imagine, if you will,  a televised major league baseball game, but instead of a director and dozens of cameras catching the most important and exciting parts of the game, there’s a single camera mounted on the pitcher’s head.  Now that would create a feeling of immediacy and drama like no other televised major league baseball game!  That appears to be the logic at work in Cloverfield, a giant-monster-on-the-rampage movie, shot with one camera, held by one character for almost the entire movie.

It’s a neat idea, a bold idea, and as it turns out, a terrible idea.  Not only does it make anyone over the age of 15 nauseous, but every critic reviewing the thing has to point this fact out.  Actually, if you are used to watching YouTube videos, you can use the same sort of general blurring of your own focus to avoid getting seasick as you do to make uploaded videos look like real pictures of something in your own mind.  Having the single viewpoint arguably makes for a purified experience–something more akin to real life, stripped of the intrusive commentary of the filmmakers.  But the idea of adding more viewpoints to a film, to cut to another character’s experience, caught on about a century ago, and hasn’t been changed very much since.  In fact, Cloverfield does include other characters in another timeline, in a fairly clever flashback device–still ostensibly edited in-camera.

But the single camera device is not Cloverfield’s downfall.  No, it’s the fact that none of the characters in the movie are worth wasting any concern about.  The first twenty minutes are spent introducing us to a house party full of smug inarticulate twenty-something New Yorkers, and their various interrelations and crushes and yearnings for one another.  I couldn’t wait for them to be killed by the monster.  I understand that there’s a long tradition of filling horror movies with loathsome young people to be picked off one by one, but the fact of the matter is that the best ones give you at least one character to care about. 


Tina, you fat lard, come get some dinner!


Our mouth-breathing cameraman is the most likeable of the bunch.   An urban Napoleon Dynamite, he documents his clumsy passes at the girl he likes with the same intensity as the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge.  Probably there is realism in the number of times he screams " Oh my God!  Oh my God!" but a movie that wasn’t pretending to not have a director would have left it at four or five.  He also comes up with the only good idea (get to the collapsed building by ascending the one next to it that’s intact) while the good-looking hero comes up with the bad ones.  "Let’s go the opposite direction of everyone else.  Let’s head toward where buildings are falling down.  Let’s go into the subway."    Why does he do these things?  Because there’s only one camera, and if he made smart choices, there’d be no movie.

The scary moments are there, but they are brief.  If you’ve seen the trailers, you’ve seen half of the good parts.  With a running time of just over an hour and ten minutes, you’ve also seen a good percentage of the whole film.

Critic and urban naturalist Jef Taylor knows that most monsters stalking the city are smaller.

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Comments

3 Responses to “Cloverfield (2008)”

  1. Natalie L. Sin on May 27th, 2008 5:20 pm

    Sounds seizure inducing, and I should know!

  2. Gregory Adams on May 27th, 2008 6:47 pm

    Also, as Jurassic Park 2 & 3 showed us, Protagonists are delicious. This monster has all of New York to eat, yet it consistently tries to nom our heroes.

    This is even more odd since the monster is so huge, they are like ice cream sprinkles to Vigo. (Sorry- weird Ghostbuster 2 non-sequitor there)

  3. Bonnie on May 29th, 2008 9:46 am

    The day they start making horror movies with sense and plot will be the day Lucifer apologizes for being vain. And that will be what the movie is about too…