Film Review - Cloverfield

Rating: 9/10 (20 January 2008)

Following a six month viral marketing campaign marked by its steadfast and absolute refusal to cough up so much as a cursory peek at its creature of feature, Cloverfield arrives as something of a miracle in this spoilerific age: an honest to goodness blockbuster that's managed to save its thrills for the theatre, an intense, accomplished dash through B-movie terrain given a snappy do-over thanks to a fresh eye and the savvy execution of a potentially gimmicky conceit.
It's the night of Rob's (Michael Stahl-David) going away party, a last hurrah thrown by his brother Jason (Mike Vogel) and his girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas) prior to his jetting off for an impressive new job appointment in Japan. Asked to document the occasion on Rob's handicam, Hud (T.J. Miller) finds it difficult to keep his wandering lens off the beautiful ring-in Marlena (Lizzy Caplan), the aloof object of his puppy-dog affections. But when Rob's one-time partner and long-time secret love Beth (Odette Yustman) departs early with her latest squeeze, it's only a hiccup in time before their lives are changed forever, as New York city finds itself at the mercy of some horror from the depths, some great, lumbering thing...
Shot entirely in handicam point-of-view with Miller's Hud acting as both commentator and cameraman, Cloverfield takes the 'human perspective of catastrophic events' approach employed by Spielberg's War of the Worlds and pushes it even further, offering a frenetic, man's-eye-view of the disastrous and grand-scale destruction typically relegated to Godzilla flicks. Towers are felled and bridges collapsed as the mysterious leviathan blazes a trail of ruin through inner Manhattan, the audience offered only the most fleeting of glances at the lion's share of the action as our band of protagonists flit in and out of shopfronts and alleyways in an ongoing effort to survive.
The hand-held photography is the real hook here, a device which proves eminently inspired. Director Matt Reeves sure knows how to sell the immediacy, ensuring the camera-work remains every nauseating bit as frantic and chaotic as you'd expect of the real thing. Sticking to his faux-vérité guns, however, means audience members craving the usual sweeping shots of the over-sized beast demolishing cultural landmarks and venting frustrations on sky-scraping highrises will be ever-so-slightly frustrated, wishing our camera-pointing heroes could perhaps adopt a brisk and steadied trot in lieu of their customarily haphazard hell-bolt. Of course, the frenzied slant obviously works wonders dramatically, and Reeves and scripter Drew Goddard even manage to find a use or two for the camera along the way beyond the obvious documentation tack to stave off any 'Why don't they just drop the damn thing and leg it?' critiques, the most noteworthy of which is a genuinely frightening giant parasite attack which plays out entirely in night vision. It's sequences like this which help reel us in, furthering the suspension of disbelief exponentially.
Of course, the harrumphing nitpickers will find much here to bemoan, from the lack of any discernible story and threadbare attempts at character development, to the questionable decisions made by said characters borne of a fundamental necessity to keep us close to the action, a problem inherent to the 'found footage' setup from the outset.
But hell, frownmongers be damned, for to focus on the minutiae is to deny yourself the thrill of an indisputably exciting exercise in escapist cinema. Cloverfield is a new take on the giant monster movie, nothing more, nothing less, and a terrifically entertaining action movie experience is there to be had for those open to it.
With its good-looking young cast and intrepid director all working overtime to ensure not a second of its economical runtime is wasted, the outstanding Cloverfield is a searing, white-knuckle monster flick from which fans of the genre will reap greatest rewards. Superior special effects and a city-trashing creature worthy of the anticipation push this over the line as a cracking, inventive example of a film that actually lives up to the hype.