Truly Brilliant Technical Film-making Applied To A Usually Dull Class Of American Cinema

Rating: 8/10 (21 July 2008)

Cloverfield transcends the reputable superficiality of Hollywood monster and disaster blockbusters. It goes beyond the simple eye-rollingly indulgent gimmicks and effects. The combined effort of the filmmakers results in a technical masterpiece in terms of suspense. There is an incredible intensity to the story and an extremely impressive relentlessness overall. This is due to the effect of revealing only what is observed through the camcorder incidentally held by only two or three of the film's characters, the reason according to the story why we are privy to any of what goes on at all.
It is preposterous for any consumer camcorder to endure past a 300-foot drop as it eventually does here, but nevertheless this technical device does so many wonders for this riveting monster film. It causes the viewer, if the viewer does not remain obstinately opposed to the film's identity as a Hollywood disaster movie, to be absorbed entirely in the story rather than the film-making. The movie's world becomes all too important to us because of how immediately and naturally this gimmick tears down the tangible obstruction between audience and on-screen life. Cloverfield succeeds at something the vast majority of American movies strives to do in this generation, which is tell a story while flaunting directorial style that appeals to the young eyes trained by the high-tech nature of this day and age. The film's premise, a video file recovered from a digital hand-held camera by the US Department of Defense, relies upon the organic use of a camcorder's perspective, a perspective which because of its accessibility ironically seems so much more immediately familiar to our eyes than 35mm film or computer-enhanced color-corrected hi-def video.
Cloverfield is a truly scary movie that, despite its depiction of college-age characters with a huge social circle and a Manhattan setting, achieves a nightmarish claustrophobia. Though so much happens and on such a large scale, we only see so much, which is the object of unfolding a story on film. One cannot deny the effect of a giant monster that military is firing at with desperate force yet we cannot see, or destruction seen vaguely from the realistic faraway vantage point, or seeing straight from a character's perspective when they fall victim to alien predator.