It 8 New York!

Quick, call Giuliani!  New York gets a monster-sized makeover in sure-fisted "Cloverfield."  (Film Review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: Run, yuppies, run!

The Downside: Once again, hype slays reality.

    Cloverfield is a smoothie, a Swiss Army knife- it follows an increasingly prevalent ideology that a movie should be all things to all people.  And in that spirit this project, which first had Gen Y'ers salivating with its obtuse summer trailer featuring nothing more than its release date and the name of uber-TV producer J.J. Abrams, is a cold-blended concoction that mixes together the world-is-coming-to-an-end rollercoaster drama of independence Day, the post-9/11 sci-fi disaster sensibility of War of the Worlds, the handheld hysteria of The Blair Witch Project, and the twentysomething relationship angst of... just about anything by J.J. Abrams.  It follows this almost schizophrenic manifesto to the end of all else, when it strikes a realm of secure but solid above averageness because, like the cipher monster in the film which takes to chomping a big honking bite out of the Big Apple, its own competing appendages keep it from nailing the trenchant genius (or just plain fun goldmine in ID4) of any of its forefathers.

    The movie, shot entirely by what must be the most amazing camcorder on the face of the planet (more on this later), is handed off in the intro between Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David), a green New York yuppie on the eve of a job promotion that'll send him away to Japan, to his more laid-back brother Jason (Mike Vogel), and finally to best buddy Hud (T.J. Miller), who provides the tight-voiced (and sometimes unsuccessful) comedic commentary for the rest of the film.  The opening twenty minutes is pretty perfunctory, as it bogs the characters down in a series of very WASP-ish emotional entanglements (Rob is pining for girl-of-his-dreams Beth (Odette Yustman), while Hud tries to put some nervous moves on another woman (Lizzy Caplan)) during a bon voyage party for Rob.  But the thoughts of loves come and lost become dust when a series of quakes start rocking the building and the head of the Statue of Liberty comes bouncing down the street.

    Given the torrent of hype behind Cloverfield (I'll still argue that it had one of the most ingenious teasers ever), it's hard to gauge exactly what anyone expected, and it may be to some disappointment that the film doesn't draw outside the lines, it doesn't do much beyond what anyone given the premise would expect it to do.  Once the still-unseen creature starts playing Rock'em Sock'em Skyscrapers through much of Midtown, the pretenses that this is going to be about anything except indistinguishable New Yorkers trying not to get eaten gets fairly well blown away.  As the Brooklyn Bridge collapses and thousands make for solid land, Rob and his friends turn around and head right into the monster's path to rescue Beth, who's trapped in a building that, let's say, makes for one of the movie's most interesting visual puzzles.  This sends them through empty streets and blackened subway tunnels, to be occasionally harassed by Big Daddy and hundreds of man-eating spider thingamajobs he's brought with him.

    If I'm making Cloverfield sound even the slightest bit pale or predictable, it isn't.  I'm just saying that it  feels like a second generation product of the more spirited ideas that came before it.  Even as major landmarks get pummeled and citizens escape rolling torrents of dust, Abrams and director Matt Reeves miss the kind of post-millennium, pre-apocalyptic allegory that made War of the Worlds hum.  And Cloverfield does make fine use of Blair Witch's theme of terror captured through a viewfinder, even if it falls for the same stumbles in logic such as unbelievably long battery life and the very reason why a person on the run for their life just wouldn't drop the damned camera.  That aside, Cloverfield ably turns itself into a  free-camera pressure cooker, but never touches the same feeling of primal dread that Blair Witch did, probably because Witch played on very human fears of isolation and the dark while this movie is a cinema verite treatment of a comic book.

    But what Cloverfield does it does well, which is more than can be said of most word-of-mouth-internet hype frenzies which are released into unassuming months (eh hem, Snakes on a Plane...).  Reeves and screenwriter Drew Goddard (both naturally veterans of Abrams' Lost/Alias/Felicity TV mill) can't make anything about Cloverfield groundbreaking, but they do make it into a 90-minute exercise in finely-tuned terror and tension.  There seem to be few missed beats in the execution: the beast makes its full appearance at just about the right time, the most wincing moments are blocked cleverly, and even the sound effects and lighting vary the anxiety pitch of the film.  Plus, the computer effects look appropriately convincing, especially given the low-tech context of it being filmed by very scared people with a Best Buy toy.  The whole look is almost seamless.

    The acting is, well, I'm not exactly sure what you expect from a group of people who really aren't tasked with anything more than to scream and run and occasionally die, which was probably Abrams' intention all along- why let the heart of the show get stolen by anybody who wants to make an impression?  So what is the heart of Cloverfield?  The monster?  Not really.  As much as he (or she?) huffs and puffs and blows a multitude of condos down, Cloverfield is really just about itself, its conceit, its idea.  It has no compelling messages or metaphors nor does it turn a mirror to our darkest demons, and like most movies designed to end on an unsettling note it comes to a close about 10 minutes after it should have.  But in January, when the intelligent or even entertaining pickings are slim, its professional skill and undeniable ease at getting us to wrest the dickens out of armrests is still an admirable diet- and that bonfire that used to Manhattan is just the perfect thing we needed to warm hearts frozen into a winter cold.  B