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It came from lower Manhattan

A brilliant achievement in film. Shame about the script
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
January 30th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Mind the pap. Forget the love story, Cloverfield is a fresh cinematic horror.
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Cloverfield

Directed by Matt Reeves
With Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, T.J. Miller, Michael Stahl-David, Mike Vogel and Odette Yustman

Had Japan’s Toho studio embraced cinéma vérité in the 1950s, Godzilla might very well have created even more film history. As it is, we’ve had to wait 50 years for Cloverfield, a creature feature filmed with hand-held cameras (aided and abetted by CGI) that successfully takes the monster genre to an entirely new level.
Cloverfield is unique in that it cleverly weaves various contemporary cultural strands together to create something surprisingly new. It’s as much Blair Witch Project as it is 9/11 paranoia. Unfortunately, it’s also a lot of Gen Y cluelessness, which often works as an unintended (I think) critique of a truly lost generation.
The concept for Cloverfield is simplicity itself. A group of young friends gather for a going-away party for one of their own in a loft space somewhere in lower midtown Manhattan. The entire party is captured on a camcorder (a la Blair Witch), and so we meet the cast of characters as they interact with their pal, Hud (T.J. Miller), the cameraman.
Halfway into the party, there’s an earth-shuddering explosion, which momentarily throws the city into darkness. The electricity is soon back on, and a newscaster reports that an earthquake has struck New York, and there’s an oil tanker listing off Liberty Island. It was no earthquake, though, and soon the lopped head of Lady Liberty is crashing onto the street outside.
The friends and their fellow New Yorkers have hardly absorbed this monumental desecration before all of downtown seems to be exploding. Soon, the walking wounded are making their way north from the dust clouds of collapsing buildings (the reference is obvious). With Hud’s camera aimed down the street, we begin to see a strange shape in the smoke. Manhattan is being attacked by a monster.
What follows is a recorded chronicle of the city’s destruction and the last of the friends trying to survive the mayhem. Hud (and the film is primarily from his point of view) is nothing if not dedicated, as even the arrival of the creature’s toothed spawn are not enough to convince him to switch off the camera and run for his life. So, in almost real time, we’ve moved from a private festive occasion to hell on earth.
It’s this very appearance of verity that lends much to the terror generated in Cloverfield (the name a designation point in what was formerly called “Central Park”). The blending of hand-held video with CGI is a revolutionary event, though those who suffer from motion sickness might want to pack the Dramamine.
As this is a novel departure in filmmaking, there are some flaws. The head of Liberty in the street (a nod, no doubt, to the poster for Escape from New York) seems hardly to scale, and the unnamed creature is less successfully realized close-up; it’s far more effective as a shadowy, unknown thing violently thrashing within the city’s canyons.
The film is filled with the requisite 9/11 tropes. The first hint of trauma erupts close to Ground Zero, though the current Wall Street implosion does offer an alternative (perhaps prescient) reading. Still, are there no other U.S. cities to destroy?
Where the film fails finally is in the framing device (a love story, unoriginally), and in the fact that the twentysomething characters are so devoid of anything resembling higher thought processes that one soon loses sympathy. How can anybody so unfailingly choose counterintuitive moves? After an “earthquake,” the time-honored custom is to flee buildings for solid ground. This group decides to head to the rooftop.
Other asinine choices (Let’s cross the Brooklyn Bridge, so that we are over an expanse of water at some considerable height) are equally foolhardy. The cast of mainly unknown or marginal character actors screams earnestly enough. The dialogue, however, most of which sounds improvised, is so lacking in wit or sense as to be stultifying at times.
In the end, this very ingrained vacuity in the characters’ thinking and speech seems far more terrifying for the future than any bastard daughter of Rodan’s running amok in Gotham.
    

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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