"Something else. Also terrible."
There is something odd about a monster movie that isn't about the monster. The brief but evocative hints at backstory indicate doom for our protagonists but ultimately a human victory, with an aftermath where survivors attempt to catalog and categorize the events*. Yet when we try to put it all together, these efforts don't quite obtain: how did a tape survive the carpetbombing of Manhattan? how does this victory jibe with the spooky backmasked "It's still alive"? "Cloverfield" makes little sense as the name of the monster itself (as the title card's "sightings of case designate" seems to indicate) or the name of the case file (to today's literal-minded military); as yet a third name for US-447/Central Park it is powerful and allusive, but chronologically impossible. We are successfully kept off-balance by these hints--we know far more than the characters but far less than the people preserving and presenting this record of events.
The movie famously opens with mundane recording of the lives of beautiful young people, mostly a going-away party featuring soapy recrimination and the cameraman's embarassing crush on Lizzy Caplan. Only after 20 minutes does an explosion remind us that a monster is coming to eat everyone. After a brief feint toward satire, as American voyeur society quickly realizes that a cell phone camera won't stop a Cthulhoid horror, the movie uses the simplest of plots (1. Find way off the island 2. Rescue pseudo-girlfriend) to set up some decent set pieces and action sequences and some good scenes of people freaking right the fuck out: a few scary bits (night-vision view in the subway tunnel), gory bits (Caplan EXPLODING, awesome), sudden surprises (monster got some Spud Webb vertical leap); standard stuff, serviceably executed.
The most terrifying part, though, is our heroes navigating the roof of a half-collapsed apartment building with no monster in sight. But Cloverfield doesn't feel like a monster movie with a motivated, personalized, allegorical** villain anyway; it's a disaster movie with an impersonal, implacable force of nature. Between the no-name cast and annoying camera work, I feared this would be a reworking of the worst parts of Blair Witch Project; I was pleasantly surprised.
*Abrams has also offloaded much of the narrative to a viral marketing campaign à la LOST. It expands the story into strange doings around the underwater-drilling, satellite-launching Japanese corporate concern Tagruato, involving their popular beverage Slusho! and its sea-mined secret ingredients (shades of Brawndo and Slurm). Yeah, I know; but at least he avoids smoke monsters, time travel, and jungle polar bears this time. So far.
**So, so relieved that the destruction of Lower Manhattan wasn't about terrorism like Godzilla was "about" nuclear blah blah blah. So relieved.
4 comments:
SO relieved.
Navigating the slanting building was my favorite part--it redeemed the time spent on the movie for me. I kept thinking how rarely one sees something new, but that's it: escaping a building that is set at a diagonal.
That rooftop temporarily took over from Phillipe Petit and hot-air balloons in my recurring nightmares.
I'm shocked to see the omission of the most noteworthy feature of this movie: it is about enormous shrimp. There are subtle hints to this cleverly weaved into the film. For example, they come from the ocean and they look exactly like shrimp. In fact one of the two things I found legitimately horrifying about it was the reminder that if shrimps were monstrous, explosion-inducing creatures, there would be nothing in the world worth eating.
While I agree the roof scene was memorable, it has far from supplanted by most recurring childhood nightmare: an invisible lobster that lives in the couch and stabs me when I try to sit down. Actually, the design of the little creatures sort of draws on that nightmare too. Maybe Cloverfield was more effective than I thought.
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