Entertaining post-modern horror movie.

Rating: 8/10 (25 January 2009)

This film is made using the hand-held amateur camera technique, a bit like the Blair Witch Project, but it's much easier to watch because instead of the incessant shouting and camera fumbling of the Blair Witch, this is calmer with more control. During first 15 minutes we are allowed to get to know the characters, and the world they live in. Occasionally, when camcorder stops, we see glimpses of another film made earlier, which the cameraman is recording over, which gives us an insight into the happy twenty-something lives of the main characters.
The horror, when it comes, is unknown. A bang, like an earthquake, a momentary power blackout, a confused newsflash. The cameraman and his friends react with a mixture of shock, curiosity and finally panic and fear, and you really feel like you are there with them. They wonder if it's a terrorist attack. In the next ten minutes, there are explosions, and a skyscraper collapses sending a cloud of dust billowing down the street between the apartments. It's a clearly a direct reference to images of 9/11.
After the initial sequences, the film moves at a very quick pace, with plenty of action and some very suspenseful moments. Along the way the film has just the right level of humour to add to its entertainment value, delivered to us in the form of comments from "Hud" the nerdy cameraman.
A central idea of the film – a big monster smashing up the city – is an obvious reference to Ishiro Honda's 1954 Japanese Godzilla movie, which featured a prehistoric creature that has been awakened from the sea by hydrogen bomb testing. If Godzilla was an allegory about nuclear war, and effects of nuclear war, then I think we can say that Cloverfield is an allegory of terrorist attack on cities. It certainly touches something in us when we see the scene with skyscraper collapsing and dazed people covered in dust looking for their families. In one part of the film a body on a stretcher is wheeled passed the camera with its stomach blown open – it made me think of suicide bombers, although it was at the same time a reference to the first Alien movie.
In this allegoric sense, the monster is a symbolic manifestation of our fear of terrorism, and the destruction terrorism can wreak in a city with a high population and so many buildings so close together. The inability of the US army to contain, to successfully stop the monster is also metaphorical, as are the "bits" that fall off it – there is no hiding place. This is an enemy that is largely created in the mind, and thus cannot be destroyed, rather like the monster in the 1950s sci-fi film "The Forbidden Planet".
I call the film post-modern because, on a deeper level, it has references to many earlier sources, such as Godzilla, to 9/11, Alien (when Marela's stomach explodes), Lovecraft (Dagon), and Forbidden Planet. If you look hard enough, you will also see that throughout the movie there are a wealth of small details that give clues about what will happen later, or that help us figure out what has happened, or just make us wonder. This suggests that the script and continuity in the movie are watertight.
I wish I'd seen it at the cinema.