Film: J. J. Abrams' Cloverfield
Monster Flick Starring TJ Miller Reminsicent of Blair Witch Project
A monster attacks New York, and a man with a camcorder, who's stuck in the middle of the chaos, manages to capture the terror on tape.(1/10)
Summary
Friends Hud and Jason have a going-away party for Jason’s brother Rob, and decide to film the entire party as a going away present for Rob. As the party goes on in their small Manhattan apartment, a monster attacks New York, bringing chaos to the city. Camcorder in hand, Hud and the two brothers attempt to flee with the rest of the city to safety, away from the warzone that Central Park has become.
Review
Cloverfield was released with the appeal of a first-person thriller, a movie that would take the viewer from the theatre and plant them in the action of the moment. Foregoing traditional film making techniques, it brings back memories of the Blair Witch Project, with its camcorder quality scenes. From the get-go, it has the feel of a bad Youtube video making it on the big screen; poor camera control, phenomenally poor AV, and a dizzying array of camera angles to make for a more ‘realistic’ home recording. One redeeming quality is the flashbacks on a tape that had mistakenly been recorded over, (it’s too bad someone didn’t take Cloverfield and tape something over it) having the present chaos and frenzy of a monster attack clash with a happier carefree day. Sadly, not even this managed to save this Tokyo-sized bust of a film from the giant oversight that those flashbacks had little (and that’s a generous statement) to do with the parts of the film they were interjected between. Moving past that, which is what we magnanimous critics do even whilst watching horrific movies (horrific as an adjective of the movie, not the genre) like the aforementioned feature film, and there’s the slight issue of the surprises in the plot; that is, that are none. From the girl, to the new boyfriend, to the tunnels, to the spiders, to the girl being alive, and the bitten one dying, where is the twist? The silver lining to this bore-tastic movie? In fact, the only thing likely to be shocking was that someone had the guts to show the monster in the movie at all; sacrificing the appeal of the unknown for more gore and girly gasps at the gargantuan beast was gutsy, but ultimately backfired, almost turning Cloverfield into a bad episode of Godzilla meets GI JOE.
While the acting was not to die for, in a film this bad, it may be only fair to give the cast an ‘A’ for effort. T.J. Miller gives a solid voice-over performance as the acting narrator Hud Platt, and his close encounter with the jaw of the beast is surely something most viewers won’t forget. His dialogue with Marlena Diamond (Lizzy Caplan) after being chased through the subway and nearly being devoured by what can only be loosely described as ‘alien spiders’, is unbelievably devoid of any fear or anxiety, as one might expect in that sort of situation. The strange acting continues when the friends rescue Beth McIntyre (Odette Yustman) from her apartment. Though impaled by a metal bar, Beth shows great resilience, never even showing signs of weakness or anything close to fainting as they escape the doomed city. Adrenaline saves the day, perhaps, or maybe it’s normal to recover so quickly after lying unconscious in a pool of your own blood for hours.
Something has definitely found us, Cloverfield. It’s a random thought that maybe the movies we viewers pay good money for should be worth seeing—and to the directors who obviously don’t understand what that means, a good place to start is with real actors, and proper cameras.
