Oh how the movies have changed. Or maybe we've changed. Maybe both

Rating: 3/10 (25 January 2008)

Hollywood has spent the last 20 years mining the pop culture of the baby boom generation. We boomers grew up watching "Flash Gordon" serials on TV, and so George Lucas gave us "Star Wars"  providing my aging generation with a chance to re-visit the collective innocence of our youth, while providing younger viewers with an opportunity to discover theirs.
But Hollywood seems to have decided that what film-goers want is a darker experience, even as they continue to sift through the childhood memories of fifty-somethings like myself. My memories of the Batman comic books of the 1950s and 60s bear little resemblance to the trip down psychosis-lane that the upcoming "Dark Knight" promises to be. And now monster movies are the latest film genre to fall victim to Hollywood's need to screw around with things that are better left alone.
Demonstrating yet again that there's nothing new under the sun, (or if there is, the suits in Hollywood won't invest in it), Cloverfield is the red-headed stepchild of the monster movies that we boomers used to watch at Saturday Matinees. Its antecedents include everything from "Them", to the "Godzilla" franchise. But what's interesting is not what "Cloverfield" has in common with these films  it's how it differs.
Monster movies are, at their core, films about crisis management. Traditionally, they begin with a revelation that the normal balance of nature has been upset. The monster is the antagonist of these films, representing mother nature aroused by something that we pesky humans have been doing, whether its exploding nuclear weapons (as in "Them", "Godzilla" and a host of others), or messing around with DNA, (as in "Jurassic Park").
The fundamental purpose of a monster movie is to reassure the audience that no matter how bad things get, Science, God and the US Military will prevail. The protagonists were often scientists (as in "Them") and all the characters (except for the villains) were fundamentally good people. They were willing to sacrifice everything  even themselves  in order to set the balance of nature right again, either by destroying the monster, (as in the first Godzilla movie) or by learning to live with it (see the rest of the Godzilla franchise).
Much has been made of Cloverfield's use of hand-held cameras, (what Roger Ebert calls "Queasy-Cam") and its refusal to observe "film grammar". I think it was Richard Roeper who observed, "Never has so much money been spent on making a movie look like crap." But in the end, these are just stylistic devices that were done more effectively in The Blair Witch Project.
The thing that really sets Cloverfield apart from other giant monster movies is not the way it looks - but the fact that its plot breaks virtually every one of the rules of the monster movie genre.
***SPOILERS AHEAD!****
Cloverfield is, at its core, a pretty nihilistic exercise. It's not about managing crises so much as it is about being overwhelmed by them. It begins with a group of young people who are celebrating the fact that one of them is leaving (how self-absorbed is that?). When the monster attacks, nobody in the movie has any idea what it is, where it came from, or why it's here. When the film's hero (Michael Stahl-David) discovers that a girl whom he slept with the night before is trapped in the wreckage of her apartment building, his friends try to discourage him from rescuing her (so much for self-sacrifice). In the end, he frees her, but the two of them die anyway, along with everybody else, (including, apparently, but not necessarily, the monster).
The message at the heart of traditional monster movies is "Humanity can survive anything, even giant lizards.", But the message of Cloverfield seems to be, "Life is pointless, and at the end we are all going to die anyway, so why bother?" Somebody should tell director Matt Reeves that if he wants to make a film about Nihilism, he doesn't need to spend $300 Million. "Fight Club" was a much better movie, and it was shot for under a third of Cloverfield's estimated budget.
And while we're on the subject of old monster movies, has anybody watched "Them" lately? Now there's a monster movie that's begging to be re-made. The script and dialog are so great that not even incredibly cheesy special effects could spoil them ("Make me a sergeant and charge the booze!" is one of my favorite lines from a movie). But please keep it away from directors like Matt Reeves, or the ants will win and in the end, the scientists will be performing horrible experiments on the little girl.
Personally, I am looking forward to a sequel. What do you think we'll get first, "Cloverfield  the Musical"? Or maybe "Cloverfield on Ice"?