The Beast Returns

Rating: 8/10 (29 February 2008)

One of the most enjoyable movie going experiences I've had in a long while. There is an inordinate amount of references from critics to this films 9/11 visual allusions, which I think are more projected than anything. There is an essay called "The Imagination Of Disaster" by Susan Sontag, which can really be applied to this film in a lot of ways. One thing Sontag notes is the depiction of the scientific/military/industrial complex in monster/disaster films; the heroic scientist, The UN security councils, the hard ass general, the plucky journalist, the madman's daughter, etc, all of which distract us from the people being killed in the exploding buildings. Cloverfield, doesn't give us a tour through aesthetic destruction, nor does it re-enforce the political models of the salvation through military force, it confines itself in the most literal sense to showing people caught in a terrifying and surreal experience. The last Godzilla film with Mathew Broderick showed New York being destroyed, but this didn't point to 9/11, so much as it points to our obsession with New York as the center symbol of modern American life and achievement, it's buildings are the great symbols of modern urban life, something terrorists and science fiction writers understand as they knock them down. The first thing that happens in this film action wise is the statue of liberty having it's head knocked off, does this mean liberty is dead, the country is without a liberated mind, or is it just a reference to the poster for "Escape From New York("another NY disaster flick), or is it all of the above? These aren't really appropriate questions for Cloverfield, which is a film without answers, but a clever one that subverts a lot of the cliché's of the monster movie genre, without any pretensions(save its advertising campaign). What I liked about this movie so much was that it was just the camera, a few people, and some monsters, and it was gripping stuff. A fifty foot monster is much scarier if it's too big to capture on camera, only seen at a glance surrounded by screams and debris, something I cant think another film doing. The shabbiness of the camera at first made me a little dizzy, but it improves as the film goes on. I actually think this kind of film making has a much bigger future than people think, another film this year "The Diving Bell and The Butterfly" used a very similar technique of withholding camera perspective to very different and very successful effect. All and all, I thought it was really good, scary even at times, and much better than any modern monster movie I can think of, maybe not "The Host", but then again...Anyway If there is any art to making monster movies, Cloverfield is it's new watermark, and is going to be the one to beat in the future. It ends and begins on Conney Island a day spent reliving old thrills from the past in ends there as well, as we relive our great Godzilla fantasies and fears.