A Test-Drive Comparison of Film-Making Gimmicks

Rating: 6/10 (6 July 2008)

It has been noted that the one thing people are really interested in is people. The whole history of culture and art stands in testament to this fact. So it beggars belief why anyone would decide that the one perspective we have really been missing all this time is a bullet's. Watching a film from a bullet's perspective is like viewing the first world war from the perspective of the ground where Archduke Ferdinand was shot. Sure it has a necessary role to play and even a small share of the action, but it's completely beside the point.
It is therefore somewhat refreshing to see a new perspective come this time not in the form of a munition but a video-camera. OK, a video-camera doesn't whiz round the screen or allow you to bend time in an ever so nifty way, but it does do one incredible thing. It forces you to make a film about people. This mainly boils down to the fact that a video-camera is limited to being picked up by one person and recording another from roughly the direction of the first. The result, a film with not one slick bullet-tracking shot to be seen; which we can agree is a good thing.
Which is why I find myself drawn to the inescapable conclusion that Cloverfield is like a hydrogen airship; it is a really neat idea that is unfortunately also a total disaster. As it turns out, when it was noted that "the one thing that people are really interested in is people", what was meant was "the one thing people are interested in is people more interesting than themselves", and it is in this respect that Cloverfield fails with gusto.
This is because Cloverfield coats itself in the banality of an authentic home-movie like a seal coats itself in the Arctic Ocean. It immerses itself in it, rolls in it and playfully flaps a flipper just to see what will happen. For the first half-an-hour of the film very little does happen. Where it's not happening is New York, in a party - which is like one of those New York parties you've heard about filled with exciting intelligent people who have interesting, insightful things to say, except that it's not. It's a party filled with people who don't have anything interesting to say at all.
So when the party is interrupted by a multi-storey alien who insists on eating the guests it's a welcome change. This is a feeling that will no doubt be familiar to anyone who has been to a party in New York. And with this the focus changes to the toing and froing of the party's survivors pursued by the hungry, hungry aliens. At least I assume they're being pursued because the aliens are hungry; quite what they are up to remains somewhat of a mystery.
And so it ends, and I find myself thinking again about bullets and how perhaps they're not so bad after all, and I find myself wishing that film-makers would just exert some self control, and thinking wouldn't it be nice if for once they thought not "can I do it?" but "should I do it?"