stunning visuals overcome narrative weaknesses

Rating: 7/10 (10 May 2008)

You sure gotta' give those New Yorkers props for resilience. If they aren't doing battle with space aliens, a bio-engineered plague, or a global warming-inspired ice age, they're fending off a nondescript creature that's come out of nowhere to lay waste to large sections of Lower and Midtown Manhattan. And indeed, after "War of the Worlds," "I Am Legend," "The Day After Tomorrow," and now "Cloverfield," one wonders just how much abuse one little island should be expected to take before finally crying uncle.
Blending the content of "Godzilla" with the style of "The Blair Witch Project," the makers of "Cloverfield" relate their story entirely through the use of a hand-held camera, as a group of twenty-something friends have their cocktail party rudely interrupted by the sudden appearance of a monster capable of tipping over skyscrapers and squashing cars as if they were bugs. The movie follows a remnant of partygoers as they wend their way through the smoky chaos of the ruined city, with one of them recording the horrors and devastation on a camcorder as he goes.
Despite having a relatively low budget for a film of this type, "Cloverfield" does a remarkable job in blending CGI graphics with home video technology. It may be true that the inky blackness of the nighttime setting helps to cover a multitude of special effects sins (some viewers may be frustrated by the murky indistinctiveness of the monster itself), but, on the whole, director Matt Reeves, cinematographer Michael Bonvillain, editor Kevin Stitt, and a team of highly talented FX and production artists are to be commended for achieving so much with so little.
The advantage of the you-are-there approach that the filmmakers have adopted is that it makes the audience feel more a part of the actual event than if the story were given a slicker, more conventional presentation. Suffice it to say there's no Will Smith here slapping on a flight suit and zooming off into the wild blue yonder to duke it out mano-a-mano with the creature and singlehandedly save the world. These are ordinary, average people caught up in extraordinary circumstances, and it's no coincidence that much of the imagery is clearly intended to evoke memories of 9/11. After all, a world where post-apocalyptic paranoia runs rampant is no place for conventional action heroes. Therefore, the verisimilitude of the piece is greatly enhanced by the use of relatively unknown players in the key roles (Michael Stahl-David, Jessica Lucas, T.J. Miller, Lizzy Caplan, Odette Yustman, Mike Vogel).
The disadvantage of this 1st person-restricted approach is that it occasionally leads to repetitiveness in the storytelling, with even the gimmick itself threatening to wear out its welcome quicker than the monster himself does. The narrow focus is also liable to drive some viewers crazy by not providing any kind of resolution or explanation to neatly wrap things up at the end (to me, this is a strength rather than a weakness).
Finally, theatergoers who were rendered nauseated by the nonstop bobbing-and-weaving camera-work on the big screen should know that the effect is much less pronounced when viewed on TV.
The characters and their relationships may be no more than mere window dressing placed at the service of the story, but that really doesn't matter, for in the case of "Cloverfield," the film-making itself is the star.