'Cloverfield'
reviewed by Donna Scott Matt
Reeves’s enigmatically titled film has benefited from
a gamut of publicity, and some may have been enchanted into
cinemas by stories of cinema-goers throwing up in the aisles.
From where I was sitting, those tales seemed plausible,
but for those who might be expecting a sickening gore-fest,
that’s not what makes you feel queasy…
Cloverfield has been described as Godzilla meets
The Blair Witch Project, and with good reason. The
story concerns a group of New York party-goers, one of whom,
Hud (T. J. Miller), has been charged with filming goodbye
messages for Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who is moving to Japan
to take up a new job. However, during the course of the party,
‘something’ attacks the city. That ‘something’
turns out to be a lizard-like monster – hence the Godzilla
comparisons, and Hud keeps the camera rolling to record events
as they unfold.
The film has been compared with The Blair Witch Project
because it has the same premise, that ‘real’ events
are being recorded by the story’s participants, and that
the tape itself has been ‘found’ in Central Park,
implying that something untoward may have happened to the filmmaker.
The sub-plot is provided by breaks in the recording, when we
can see part of the previous film Rob made on the tape, of a
day out in Coney Island with his more-than-friend, Beth (Odette
Yustman).
At just 85 minutes, Reeves’s film fits neatly onto the
length of a video tape, but blink and you may miss some of
the very subtle characterisation. The ‘eye’ of
the bulk of the story, Hud, has barely a minute on screen,
and not too much of the dialogue, but some clever direction
sees his character grow from a lecherous and unserious moron,
to a person showing loyalty and diplomacy towards his friends,
even though part of you might wonder why he doesn’t
just drop the camera, or even wish that he could hold it a
bit more steadily sometimes. The acting performances themselves
are all competent, though nothing to write home about.
The shakiness of the camerawork might be reminiscent of The
Blair Witch Project, but the visual effects certainly
aren’t. Initially, we are teased with glimpses of the
monster and the parasitical creatures that accompany it, but
there are explosions and attacks by the military happening
on a grand scale… and all the while the monsters get
closer.
The film’s tension is managed very well, considering there’s
no scary music and not much death is seen on screen. There is
probably just enough gore to cope with, considering the jerkiness
of the film, which was what made me feel ill, but you may also
be nauseated by the cheesiness of the sub-plot, if not the youthful
good looks of all the main characters.
I thought Cloverfield was an original idea, competently
executed, but felt that it was missing a good deal of back story.
I didn’t need to know where the monster came from, but
I did expect the film to be self-contained, which it isn’t.
It’s a film for the multimedia age: Rob is set to work
for a company making a fictitious drink, Slusho, which also
features in other J. J Abrams productions Lost and
Alias, and there is a website for both this and the
associated company that was mining for ingredients off the North
East coast of the US, with hints that a terrorist attack from
‘Tidowave’ may have unleashed the monster. The characters
all have their own MySpace pages, too. All this hints at a franchise,
the whole of which may be greater than the sum of its parts…
and who knows? Perhaps another film.
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