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Cloverfield
More monster, less yuppie
2007
Review: January 29, 2007
Director: Matt Reeves
Starring: Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, T.J. Miller, Michael Stahl-David, Mike Vogel, Odette Yustman
Yup.
THE SETUP:
Monster attack via the videotape of idiot yuppies.
DISCUSSION:
Well you know, I’m a sucker for any kind of monster movie, and this one looked from the trailers to be fairly nasty. So even when the reviews came in that this was a feature-length gimmick in nauseating handheld with too little monster and too many yuppies—offset by some other reviews that said it was truly scary and that it’s all a satire on precisely HOW moronic our single-minded consumer yuppies are today—I had to go see it for myself.
This movie takes the Blair Witch Project idea [which, before that, was the Cannibal Holocaust idea] that what we’re seeing is a videotape in the remains of some horrible catastrophe. Yes, the entire movie is in shaky, hand-cam video. We open in this fabulous loft in the Time Warner center. This is the apartment of Beth’s dad, which she has just used to sleep with the vacuous Rob. It is he manning the camera, and he wakes Beth up with it and suggests they spend the day at Coney Island, which she has never been to. Then suddenly we’re at this party a few months later—the earlier footage was stuff that was taped over for what we’re seeing here. It’s a fairly clever way to work flashbacks into the story with the stricture that we only see what the video sees. We are now at Rob’s going-away party, as he is shipping off for a job in Japan. Rob’s brother is taking the video, but soon recruits the blabbermouth moron Hud to assume duties, going around the party and taping video testimonials to what a sweet dude Rob is, Bro. Also on hand are Rob’s brother’s girlfriend Lily, and a woman Marlene, who clearly wants Hud to leave her alone so she can devote her full attention to her cell phone.
So Beth shows up at the party with a date, and Rob, who has not seen or even called her since they slept together, that once, is all pissed and at one point implies that she’s a slut for having a date, months later, with a guy who presumably calls her and is not moving to Japan. Okay, so Rob is a total asshole. He gets worse. And ladies and gentlemen, this is your main character.
Hud tapes Rob and Beth having a private conversation [asshole!], then goes inside and spreads the news that they slept together to everyone [asshole!]. There’s a shot of Rob giving a speech that is interrupted by some other people taping it on their phones and such, and you wonder if this is a comment on our cameras-everywhere documentary society, and perhaps the people who seem only to be able to experience life through the interface of an electronic device. And of course, here we are in the audience, voyeurs watching their experience. Woah: indicted, dude. Totally, bro!
So all of a sudden the lights go out and everyone runs up to the roof, where they see a huge explosion downtown. Then they all run down to the street, where the head of the Statue of Liberty lands nearby, followed by a stream of smoke that it an exact replica of certain 9/11 footage. Our heroes are all like, totally freaked, and end up trying to get across the Brooklyn Bridge to escape. While on it, Rob gets a cell phone call from Beth, alone in her dad’s apartment at 59th street, and tries to talk to her as the bridge collapses and his brother is killed. They then run back to Lower Manhattan. Across from them, people are looting an electronics store, and Rob wanders in, looking for a battery for his phone so he can call Beth back, while ignoring the extreme danger and his friends’ entreaties and the reality that his brother just died. He finds a battery, attempts to call, then decides that he must make his way up to rescue Beth, that girl he slept with once.
Okay, so are we to understand that Rob is psychotic? He barely knows this woman, seems barely phased by the fact that his brother just died, is ignoring imminent peril, and is about to set off on an idiotic quest to rescue someone who will surely be dead by the time he arrives. I’m still not sure if we’re supposed to find this all terribly brave and romantic, because all the signs point to Rob having lost his mind. So then what are we to think when his friends decide to go with him? That they’ve all lost their minds as well? That they are all such little vacuums who picked up their sense of human values from watching Braveheart reruns on TBS and beer commercials? These questions hang over the rest of the movie and further alienate you from the characters, none of which were that appealing anyway.
SPOILERS > > >
So they pop down the subway at Spring Street and pop up, ten minutes later, at 59th [approximately four miles], having been attacked by the little mini-monsters the big monster brought along for company. Beth’s apartment tower has collapsed, and is leaning against another building so, nutcases that they are, they decide to scale the upright building and transfer to the semi-collapsed one—rather than attend to saving their own lives—in an effort to rescue a person whom no one has heard from for hours and is in all probability dead. They scale 57 flights while barely becoming winded [all those Pilates courses really WILL pay off in case of apocalypse!], rescue the woman who, although lying IMPALED for several hours, has not lost enough blood to prevent her from running down the street at full speed just a few minutes later. Talk about urban warriors!
< < < SPOILERS END
Did I enjoy it? Only marginally. There was just too much of the yuppies and not enough of the monster [although the monster does seem to shadow our heroes with uncanny accuracy]. At times the monster is right over there and idiot Hud has the camera trained at his moron friends as they blab and fret. There were some good scares and the monster is freaky, but it’s not really showing what you want to see. Oh, and by the way, the screenplay is made up almost entirely of "Oh my God!," "Rob!," and "We gotta get out of here!"
The conceit of showing the videotape supposedly shot at the scene is not only a way to save money overall, it is a way to deny a directorial presence, to deny that the movie is constructed at all, and while this works to a degree to provide the viewer with a heightened sense of immediacy and feeling that anything can happen, it also reduces the substance of the movie, and lends to the feeling that it’s just a gimmick. It also, because there is no ostensible beginning, middle or end [and what there is could only detract from the overall conceit], leaving one with a feeling of, you know, having just watched a bunch of footage. Interesting, maybe, but without the overall shape and depth of a real movie and the resonance it may or may not leave you with.
But the real problem is those insipid characters, and the problem, very distancing to me as an audience member, as to whether they’ve all had psychotic breaks or they’re just phenomenally stupid. Hey, I’ve seen the movie and I still don’t know, so if this is all some brilliant satire I’m not picking up on the clues that tell us that. If not, well, I’m sorry if the filmmakers think that these are intriguing or admirable characters. Matters do not end well for many of the characters involved, and it’s hard not to realize that if Rob hadn’t been such a dunderheaded sentimental narcissist, and if his friends had a little more spark in their synapses, many more of them would have survived to the end of the movie.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
Like me, I'm sure you'll watch it regardless of what I say. But you, me, everyone can live without it, big time.
