Cloverfield flawed but good

Rating: 8/10 (29 January 2008)

This contemporarily hip, memorably dark monster genre revival has moments of cinematic mastery as well as lapses of almost laughable ridiculousness (even for a monster movie), and the combination yields a good but not great experience that sticks with you with surprising firmness. The film follows a tight-knit group of trendy New Yorkers as they try to survive a hellish assault on their city by a giant, indestructible, and viciously pernicious amphibian. The ground-level portrayal of the attack is often brilliant, using 9/11 imagery (a cloud of dust chases people after the collapse of a building, and showers of office paper flutter down from damaged skyscrapers), ominous fleeting glimpses of the gargantuan perpetrator as it stalks and stumbles through the streets, and convincing special effects that make us flinch as cars are crushed like cola cans, missiles of rubble rain into crowds of onlookers, and a mass evacuation is organized in the opposite direction of rumbling tanks and shouting soldiers. The characters themselves aren't quite real enough for us to truly care for them, but we see enough of a going away party for the main character (Rob) immediately preceding the turmoil, and glimpses and pieces of stirring humanity during the attack (Rob is called by his worried mother presumably watching news reports from far away in one of the film's best scenes), to sympathize with them adequately. The dialogue, however, is too often tortuous, and sporadic attempts at comic relief make us consider rooting for the monster. Certain scenes break the trance of terrifying realism that envelopes most the movie. And ultimately, contrary to the director's intentions, the home video style filming technique hurts the impact of the terror by making the audience merely secondary, "after-the-event" observers. In order for us to be fully engaged in the victims' plight, we had to see and hear with their eyes and ears, not their super-durable camcorder. Yes, the thing made me nauseous. The director could have preserved the laudably tragic effect of cutting randomly to home video footage of the main character's romantic day with his lover a month before the attack by giving the characters a camcorder that they turned on only occasionally. Despite its flaws, the movie is a must-see.