Movie Review: Cloverfield

Cloverfield At last! The long-awaited and much-anticipated new sci-fi-monster-action-thriller is here. This movie has been under a secrecy lid that would have made Lubyanka proud. Nobody knew anything about it except for the tantalizingly brief glimpses of something in the trailer. Cloverfield is the government code word for the “incident”. This movie is awesome—way better than most of the critics are claiming. They’re all idiots anyway. It is a breakthrough, it raises the bar, breaks the mold.
Picture this: Rob is moving to Japan—big promotion—and his friends are having a party for him. One of the guys, Hud, is tagged to videotape the whole thing, getting testimonials from everybody. The party is noisy, but we the audience manage to hear a few big thumps in the background. Then a big jolt. Earthquake. The lights go out, then come back on. And everything is being seen through the lens of this amateur videographer. They go up to the roof to see if they can see anything. Suddenly there is a huge explosion somewhere uptown. Pieces of debris come flying over and in. People are screaming . . . the guy with the camera is screaming. They run down the stairs, image jumping everywhere, making you dizzy. Out on the street people are screaming, running. Another explosion, and something comes flying towards you, hits the street, bounces and crushes a few cars. When it stops you discover it’s the head of lady liberty—as in the statue of. Panic, mayhem. Building are collapsing, there is a sound booming through the air you would not want to hear twice in your life time.
New York is under attack.
All the actors are no names—never seen any of them before. They do a great job. The entire movie is shot with a video camera as Hud, Rob, Lilly and Marlena try to stay alive, then go back into the city to rescue Robs girlfriend. He received a brief call—she is in her building and she can’t move. In the meantime something is destroying the city. The army arrives and is ineffective against this nightmare creature (which we haven’t even seen yet) but they manage to begin a mandatory evacuation and protect the civilians as they flee.
That’s all for the plot. This flick rocks the house. The tension level is a nine on the Richter scale. It starts out with no credits. Instead we are told it is an eyes only account of the “incident” called the Cloverfield event. Hud never stopped filming and it is the best record the government has. It is so inventive, so well done, that you totally forget it’s not real. Even the monster, when we finally see it, doesn’t break our concentration because by now we have totally bought into the whole documentary thing. And no one knows what the thing is, or where it came from or what it wants. It is the anti-Godzilla movie. Usually some bright scientist gives us a running explanation as to what is happening and why—think Matthew Broderick in Godzilla—but not this time. (Don’t get me wrong, I love Godzilla.) The camera follows the twenty-something’s with commentary by Hud—a dim bulb—all the while. Bombs exploding, guns firing, tanks shooting round after round, jets screaming overhead, and helicopters shuttering through the canyons of the city—all getting their asses kicked. The point of view never changes, we only see what Hud sees, and the lens.
Okay, enough. Did you see The Blair Witch Project? This one has the same intensity, the same immediacy. Except it’s way better. This movie is a masterpiece, but not a lot of people are going to see it that way, so be forewarned. It is straightforward, head banging terror. Which comes not from gore or sudden noises, or hideous acts of cruelty by demented, demonic mutants, but from the fear of not knowing what’s going on. Never. Total ignorance in the midst of indescribable and impossible chaos. It’s not our terror—it’s their terror. It ends the same way it started, following the survivors until they stop moving. It is not the movie we see in the trailer. It is more complex, more subtle, more human. It is brutally realistic. It has no ending . . . the tape just stops and we finally hear music as the credits begin to roll. Awesome!
It is rated PG-13 but don’t take little kids. It’s a good date movie if your partner is a total freak. There is a little cussing, a little blood, a really big monster like nothing you’ve ever seen, and lots of dog sized-crab-shrimp-scuttley little manic biters. They fall off the thing like barnacles from a Teflon ship hull.
The CGI is incredible. Newell and I saw it at the Rave, in the Town Center and they have new DPL projectors. The picture and sound are so superior it hurts. Cloverfield is a keeper.