Cloverfield is audacious.

Rating: 8/10 (30 January 2008)

this review contains spoilers!!!!! - That's a word I certainly didn't think I would be using in conjunction with a movie that I have been sort of dreading, a movie wrapped in a nonsense blanket of mystery marketing. Here's the answer to the mystery: Cloverfield is about a big monster who attacks New York City and the group of annoying, pretty yuppies who have to deal with it while filming it all. That's it. There's no Slusho, no conspiracy, no deeper meaning. There isn't even a reveal of the monster's origins, and it never gets a name. It's actually surprisingly straightforward.
That's one of the two big things that writer Drew Goddard and director Matt Reeves got right; the other is the monster mayhem, which is impressive in scale and presentation (if not always logical - the monster's path through Manhattan makes no sense unless he is specifically pursuing our hapless and hated heroes). The monster is revealed in full, but the movie takes its time getting there, which is appreciated - especially since I wasn't completely over the moon about the final shots of the beast, which are pretty much full frontal. The monster works incredibly well in bits and pieces, especially because its anatomy is so strange; trying to figure out how these disparate body parts fit together is kind of much of the fun. And the flashes of the beast - especially its first face shot during a pitched battle with the National Guard - only add to the nightmarish surreality of the film.
Sadly, Reeves and Goddard messes other things up. There's not a single character in this film to root for, and it's not because they're meant to be difficult characters to enjoy. They're shallow, vapid, beautiful yuppies, the kind of people who, when they start showing up at your favorite dive bar, signal the end of that establishment as you knew it. The main character, Rob, has a huge apartment on the Lower East Side that boggles the mind; we're talking about a space that costs millions in today's market, or even a couple of years ago, if we're assuming Rob bought it while the neighborhood was still 'up and coming'*. None of this would be that big of a problem - after all, I could just revel in seeing these people in terror and pain - except for the fact the movie is structured in a way that indicates we're supposed to care about these people and their relationships.
What pushes the film's narrative forward is the fact that Rob desperately wants to find Beth, a girl he loves but has treated poorly, to save her from the chaos visited on the city. The main characters skip an opportunity to leave Manhattan with the army** to go with Rob on an insane mission to find this girl in a city being torn apart by a massive beast that has risen from the sea and that has little monsters falling off of it, eating people. Watching the movie I found this outrageous - how stupid could these people be? - but talking this point over with Nick I came to a weird realization: I had once done the same thing. On the day that the Twin Towers fell I was home, having overslept. My office was three blocks from the Towers, and my best friend was there - she had actually gone into the city when she saw the first plane hit the Towers because her father worked there. My first reaction was to run as fast as I could to the Brooklyn Bridge to get into Manhattan to try and find my friend. This was a stupid reaction, and a futile reaction, but it was the first one I had, and it was primal and happened without thought. And yet I couldn't buy Rob doing essentially a heightened version of the same thing, and I especially couldn't buy his friends going with him. To me it's a reflection of how little these characters resonated with me - even a reaction that I could identify with from experience feels alien coming from this phony person.
I could go on nitpicking Cloverfield, but this is a positive review. The movie is flawed, deeply, but it works while you're sitting there in the theater, and with a movie like this, that's the main goal. I don't know if Cloverfield will hold up to repeat viewings or not but that first time is a blast. The action propels you along fast enough that you barely have time to raise the logical questions while you're watching, and the set pieces are done with style and verve. The movie has no music until the end credits, which have a bombastic, monster movie theme by Michael Giacchino called 'Roar!'; that theme belongs to the bigger picture movie that tells the full story of what happened in New York City that night, but I'm glad that Cloverfield focused on the small moments (well, as small as they get when the monster seems to be specifically chasing the characters in the film). In a lot of ways Cloverfield reminded me of the seminal graphic novel Marvels, which told the history of the Marvel superhero universe through the eyes of the man on the street. That perspective makes a moribund genre like the monster movie suddenly come roaring to life.