You say Gojira, I say Godzilla

Rating: Null/10 (17 June 2009)

"Memory-keeping is a function increasingly assigned to the electronic media, whilst a new awareness of the artifice of representation casts a cloud of suspicion over the documentation of the past." – Jose Van Dijck (Mediated Memories in the Digital Age)
"Cloverfield" is the last in a long line of post 9/11 monster movies. Reflecting the anxieties of a populace cowering irrationally in the fear of faceless middle eastern terrorists, these films all feature everyday Americans under attack by giant CGI beasts. With their huge monsters and burning cities, this micro-genre closely resembles a burst of similar films released after the atomic bombings of Japan ("Godzilla" etc) and, to a lesser extent, the nuclear anxieties of early cold war cinema, with their giant radioactive beasts and bugs ("Them!", "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" etc).
Of these post 9/11 monster movies, only Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" and Frank Darabont's "The Mist" have aged well. Spielberg's film may be dishonest in portraying the enemy as technologically advanced Muslims ("Are they terrorists!" a character yells at one point) embedded in underground sleeper cells and waiting to strike, but its camera work and action set pieces have a balletic grace that few directors can match. And while Darabont's "The Mist" handles its CGI sequences ineptly, it's beautifully written and features genuine character interactions.
Great characters and great action sequences are precisely what "Cloverfield" lacks. Instead, the film hopes to wow us with documentary realism. Filmed to resemble footage awkwardly captured by consumer video cameras, "Cloverfield" pretends to be the "authentic" and "documented" account of an important historical event (an attack on New York by a giant monster). What's interesting is that, aside from its mediated view (the film is shown solely through one man's perspective), it is also simultaneously re-meditated, the witness filming others who are themselves filming the event (on phones and cameras).
This faux documentary style of cinema isn't new. "Cannibal Holocaust", "The Last Broadcast", "The Blair Witch Project", "X-Cops", "Open Water", "Paranormal Activity" and "The McPherson Tapes" all presented themselves as recovered historical footage, each showing attacks on humans by various monsters (witches, cannibals, werewolves, aliens etc) which the eyewitness was fortunate to record due to his possession of a camcorder. Significantly, the cameraman dies at the end of each of these films.
"Cloverfield" continues this trend. At one point in the film the cameraman crosses a dangerous bridge and yells that he "wants others to see what went on here". It's a throwaway bit of dialogue, but it highlights how humans are increasingly outsourcing themselves to their technical, extended memories. It does not matter if we survive, what matters now is that the "camera is kept alive" and that its digitized memory is safely stored. What the characters in "Cloverfield" are concerned about is not their own memories of the event, but their ethical responsibility to "capture" and "digitally remember" the event for future generations.
This mirrors real world trends, in which ordinary events are increasingly treated as history before they even occur. Think of the hordes of people walking around recording mundane events with their cell phones, or the thousands of people who visit sporting events, ceremonies and music performances, eyes affixed to their tiny camcorder or phone screens rather than the event itself. On a more graphic scale, think of the Korean student in the US who went on a shooting rampage at a University. In the middle of the slaughter he stopped suddenly to mail a "press pack" to the media, then promptly resumed his mayhem. The priority for these people is no longer to experience the event itself as it is occurring, but the recording of the event for future consumption.
But what people are really doing, with all their technological gizmos, is attempting to prolong the pleasure of the event. They digitise and store their "special moments" for some kind of future gratification. The end result is that so many moments are collected, stored and saved for later use, that the user either never gets a chance to revisit the event, misses the event as it occurs in the present, or trivialises the "special event" by putting it in a digital data-bank filled with millions of other similar events. It's a form of modern greed, the user frantically hording digital memories.
On a larger level, films like "Cloverfield" demonstrate that we are in a culture that is formally nostalgic to an astonishing degree. It is precisely the failure of historical awareness that leads to the rise of nostalgia. Those who can't remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever. Everything becomes a "re-make", a bland simulation, but one that always seems "new" because there is neither the memory nor the historical context/awareness of the original.
And so the characters of "Cloverfield" run to their deaths, desperate to save their digital memories for future consumption, historical archival and personal fame. The irony is that what they record has been recorded before, both by cinema and by history.
7/10 – Films like "Cloverfield" and "War of the Worlds", mark an age where cinema spectacle is dead. They are anti CGI and anti spectacle, downplaying special effects for fleeting glimpses of CGI wizardry and shaky-cam realism. The way out of this trend seems to be "word cinema", a reliance on word oriented drama and literary twists and turns, and the upcoming hype of 3d, itself a nostalgic technology of the past.
Worth one viewing- I'd take the 1954 "Gojira" or even "Godzilla vs Mothra" over this rip off. For a better modern "giant monster movie", check out "The Host", "The Mist" and "War of the Worlds". What's amazing is how identical these new big budget movies are to the old classics. For example, there is nothing separating "Jurassic Park" from either "The Beast from 20,000 fathoms" or "The Valley of Gwangia", aside from the replacement of solid-state models with CGI.