Stunning and Groundbreaking

Rating: 9/10 (28 January 2008)

There are only three other movies that I have seen that have evoked such intense empathy on my part as did "Cloverfield""Open Water," "The Blair Witch Project," and "Wolf Creek." All of them shared, to a varying degree, features that I consider extremely effective: a cast of unknowns, minimal to no musical score, a minimal to nonexistent use of sets, and dialogue that one must think was improvised or so ingeniously written that the viewer is convinced that the people on the screen are not actors, but are real, and ordinary people that are being eavesdropped upon. A large part of making that work is that films such as these take their time in getting the viewer to the crisis/disaster, and convince you of the fact that the people on screen don't just exist for the sake of the movie, but existed, and have lives and concerns and issues that began, long before we are introduced to them on the screen.
Thus, when they experience the horrors that they eventually do, one feels right there with them, and feels that what is on the screen is really happening to them.
There are no opening credits; the opening scene of the movie is of one of the twentysomething male characters in a rather posh upper Manhattan apartment, clowning around with his camera, and then rousing his sleeping girlfriend. They tease each other about what they are going to do with the day. In the background, out the window, are Central Park, the forest of buildings and the streets far below, teeming with traffic. The dialogue is completely mundane and real. The view of the city, on the eve of what is to happen, is majestic, and spectacular. That is clearly for a reason.
Eventually, we see the preparations for a party, one of the characters arguing and bantering with his other friends, shopping at a corner grocery store, one of the women getting off a line that causes the cashier to laugh.
Then the party at a midtown Manhattan walk up apartmentagain, all captured by the hand-held camera that changes hands and is there for posteritya send off gift to one of the principal characters who is off to Japan for a big-time job.
The movie spends a lot of time at the party, one attended almost exclusively by other twentysomethings gossiping, dancing, goofing off, drinking, making fools of themselves, and flirting. Again, I got the sense that it wasn't a movie, but a documentary or reality TV show of a real party. It, and the participants were in and of themselves so believable and interesting that I and some of the other people in the audience chuckled at what was going on.
Disaster, and the end of life as was known, begins without warning, and in the blink of an eye. The amount of time that the movie has spent showing us the characters, and the city, during normal and ordinary life renders what unfolds for the rest of the movie all the more wrenching. Life, and reality, for the characters, and for New York City, is turned upside down, and irrevocably, in an instant.
Unlike any previous such disaster/monster film that I know of "Cloverfield," shows in graphic and realistic horror (with the viewer in the middle of it) what the people on the ground would experience were such a thing to really happen.
In reading some of the reviews online or in the papers, I've noted that people have talked of, or criticized, the movie's implied allegories to 9/11. I think that's overly simplistic. The source of the chaos and death is almost irrelevant. The human condition/reaction under such circumstances would be the same whether one substituted any sudden real world calamity--a mass terrorist attack, an earthquake, a bombing raid, or tsunami. The horror would not only stem from the source of the destruction, but the suddenness of the event, the complete lack of knowledge (at least initially) of what is happening, and the utter helplessness. In communicating this, "Cloverfield," was unsparing in depicting what it would probably be like to be at that age, to begin an evening, at a party, with a vast future seemingly assured and taken for granted, and then, by wee hours of the following morning, to suddenly have the rug pulled from under you, and to suddenly be in the middle of a war zone, fighting for your life, clawing for survival, seeing the city you live in crumble, and seeing people--including people very close to you--dying en masse and violently, before your eyes.
The special effects were all the more potent in that the advent of the attack begins at night, amid a sea of light and explosions. The depiction of the collapsing of the buildings was not merely effectiveit looked as if it were really happening. Initially all that we, and the characters know is that a vast and destructive force has been unleashed, and is completely out of control. The creature, when finally revealed, is all the more terrifying in that it is totally malevolent, destructive in the extreme, and in that no one we encounter in the film, from the military people to the newscasters, seems to have a clue as to what it is, where it came from, or how to stop it.
An especially effective, and heart sinking scene is when the soldier confides in one the characters and his companion, the true magnitude of what is happening, and that if they're to try to find one of their friends, they have little time and need to get out of the city as soon as possible. It is all but confirmed to the viewer that there will be no eleventh hour triumph, or happy ending.
"Cloverfield" is a first of its kind meld of drama and science fiction that I think is destined to be a classic.