Watch that last shot again

Rating: 9/10 (27 April 2008)

I awaited Cloverfield with almost wild anticipation. Sadly, it was released in theaters about two days before I had to go back to China (I was home in California visiting family for the winter holidays), and I didn't have time to see it before I had to leave. It would have been nice to see it on the big screen (this alleged "motion sickness" has never affected me in the least, either here or in the similarly photographed Blair Witch Project), but even on pirated Chinese DVDs the movie looks pretty good.
Given that so much of the monster portion of the movie passes without us ever really learning much about the monster, it's odd that the beginning of the movie, which is just a personal home video taken by some friends to congratulate someone on getting married, seems like it goes on about five times longer than it should. Maybe that's because for much of that part of the movie, there seems to be developing a very involved romantic drama which will become meaningless within a few minutes. Of course, it doesn't become entirely meaningless, only about half of it does. In fact, I should mention that, for a romantic subplot squeezed into a monster movie, this one actually works quite well. I hope Bruckheimer is taking notes.
At any rate, it is well known that the Statue of Liberty does not fare well in the movie. One of the original teaser trailers famously showed the statue's head being thrown down a New York City street, and they really should have left it at that. In the movie, they don't know how to have people react to such an occurrence. As soon as the head comes to rest, a lot of people gather around it like mindless zombies, snapping photos of it with their cell phones. Evidently these people are so brainwashed by technology that they are more concerned about e-mailing these amazing photos to all their buddies than they are in what exactly threw that head. Personally, I like to think that I'd be amazed if such a thing happened, but for at least the following few seconds, I would be more concerned about where the head came from!
Once the movie gets going, however, it never lets up. The monster is a brilliant creation of digital effects, which detract from movies far more often than they add. Th CGI is spectacular in this movie, and that is not a comment that I make often! In the extra features on the DVD, there is a lot of talk about presenting the monster not as an angry beast bent on destroying, but as something like a frightened infant fighting for it's survival. A scared baby monster (one as massive and frightening as this one) being injured and not knowing why is definitely a force to be reckoned with, although there is nothing in the movie to let us know any of that. For all we can see, it's just an angry beast bent on destroying.
The only major drawback of the movie is the bonehead holding the camera. Another idea mentioned in the extra features on the DVD is that the movie originally came about as an effort to create America's own movie monster, given that Godzilla, so many decades after its debut, is still a major part of Japanese pop culture. Sadly, this guy "Hud" (which stands for Heads-Up Display, not Humanoid Underground Dwellers, but good guess) strikes me as the results of an effort to create the most idiotic, dumbed-down American caricature possible. Here's a bit of sample dialogue:
Hud: "What time does the chopper take off?"
Rob: "0600."
Hud: "Uh, what time is that?"
Rob: "6am!"
Hud: "Oh, yeah. I knew that."
Good thinking, moron. Way to represent the homeland. I live in the heart of Communist China, and I feel I should tell you that, especially with all of the controversy about American protests about Tibet and the Beijing Olympics, many people in the world have much difficulty differentiating between the American people and, say, their government, or their movies.
One of the main difficulties that the movie has to overcome, however, is why this Hud would go on holding a video camera while his whole world was being destroyed around him. He was reluctant to take on the job of filming at the beginning of the movie, so it's strange sometimes that he always holds on to it and always points it at what needs to be seen. But surprisingly, this never really seems like a problem to me. Sometimes we have to wonder why he's holding it, like when he climbs onto the roof of a high-rise apartment building which is leaning precariously on the building across the street, but they make excellent use of broken clips, and cuts back to what was originally on the tape, to show times when Hud stopped filming and then started again later.
I think many people will be put off by the fact that so little is actually learned about the monster, but I think this might be the film's strongest point. First of all, the movie is left wide open for a sequel, not the least reason for which is because the entire movie consists of a single DV tape that the government found at the "former location of Central Park." Think of how many other tapes might be found and made into more movies!
But most of all, pay special attention to the right side of the screen in the very last shot of the movie, which looks out over the ocean. In my opinion, that's all we really need to know