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1/3/2008
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Cloverfield (2008)
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At a trendy Manhattan apartment, Rob Hawkins’ leaving party is in full swing. Suddenly, the earth shakes and the lights flicker off and on. Explosions light up the skyline and flaming debris rains down upon the city. The severed head of the Statue of Liberty is bowled down the street by some unseen force. Something huge has arrived in New York; a sky-scraper-sized monster that I won’t describe here because you really have to see it to believe it. It rampages around the island like a force of nature, brutally destroying all in its path and indiscriminately making victims of the terrified citizens.
We follow Rob, his brother’s girlfriend Lily, and their friends Marlena and Hud, as they attempt to rescue Rob’s friend and sometime-lover Beth from her apartment in the heart of Manhattan. Of course, along the way terrible things happen, buildings are destroyed, people get killed. Forget Godzilla. Forget King Kong. This is the most exciting, tense, and kinetic cinema experience I’ve had for a long time.
The whole movie is filmed as though on a handheld camera. Sweet but dumb Hud is our eyes for nearly the whole experience; we see things only when his camera sees them, which heightens the sense of confusion and terror. There is no score, and no cross-cutting to the president making decisions or the army preparing their forces. We only see what our group of characters see, hear what they hear, know what they know. The camerawork can be dizzying at times, especially when Hud is running, which, this being a monster movie, is quite a lot of the time. The dialogue is realistic and though there is not much time to develop the characters, the performances are strong enough to elicit empathy from the audience.
Producer J.J. Abrams (creator of cult TV series ‘Lost’ and ‘Alias’) and director Matt Reeves (who has mostly worked in television before now) have created a good old fashioned monster movie with as much death and destruction as you could wish for, but have given it an interesting and inspired twist by concentrating solely on the survival of a small group of characters. Filming in the way they have enhances the audience’s sense of being there and experiencing the horrors and the excitement first-hand. A must-see movie.
Review by Catherine Leopold
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