Monstrous Shakycam

Rating: 9/10 (20 January 2008)

As far as pushing the boundaries of convention goes, I've still got to give it to Blair Witch Project for a simple reason: its hand-held camera-work does not inspire me to scream "Hold the heck still!" at the screen. Hud, the cameraman in Cloverfield, has got to be addicted to caffeine for all the shakiness and inability to keep the camera on something for more than 1.6 seconds. Or else it's ADD. I'm not one of those weaklings who got dizzy from The Bourne Ultimatum, but I appreciate being able to see what I'm looking at if the whole point of shooting a movie on video is to make it feel like you're actually there. But then the producer, J.J. Abrams, is famous for never making anything too clear (as evidenced by his TV shows "Lost" and "Alias").
This is a monster movie, along the lines of Godzilla or The Host, but with a twist. Everything we see is purported to be a videotape found after the monster eats Manhattan. The video starts as a collection of farewell messages to Rob, a 20-something who has a million 20-something friends and who is moving to Japan for work. His best friend Hud is running the camera, interviewing Rob's pals, and hitting on Marlena, who ain't hitting back. Then the entire city shakes and the lights go out, rudely awakening all the characters out of an awkward situation involving Rob and his friend (and more) Beth. Everybody's probably seen what happens next - explosions in the distance, panic in the streets, and the head of the Statue of Liberty crashes in front of Rob's building. Aside from this very sentence, I'll not make any comparisons to 9/11 - scared people in a city running away from something bad does not inherently carry political or social meaning. This is a monster movie and like any monster movie, people have to run away from the monster en masse.
What makes this one different, though, is not just that it's shot with a camcorder. This is a special monster movie because we rarely see the monster and therefore are stuck with the characters and we learn only what they learn. This story is about the human tragedy that is glossed over in all the old Godzilla flicks where someone screams, "GOJIRA!" and takes off. What about that man's family? Is his home destroyed by the creature? Those other movies are usually about scientists and military people scheming to kill whatever beast is plaguing Tokyo now. From Mothra to Independence Day, that's the formula. Formula is turned on its head when we stop caring if the General will drop an A-bomb on the thing and we start seeing the battle in the streets between average people and the boar-sized insects that live on the huge thing's back. One scene in a dark subway tunnel is one of the best of its kind, where the stalking creatures aren't there and then, suddenly, they are. See The Descent for more night vision camcorder scariness...
Special credit must go to the special effects artists on this movie. With maybe a couple exceptions, everything that would be fantastical and impossible in another movie looks perfectly real here. The bugs in the subway don't look like a special effect that we are meant to admire, they look like vicious, man-eating creatures from another dimension or something and they really are terrifying, the same way a rabid dog staring you down is terrifying. The effects tricked my brain into thinking everything was real and I can't remember the last time that happened. Cloverfield has a really simple story at its core, about a small group of survivors looking for an injured friend, and it has some rather annoying camera-work (which is absolutely worse than just motion sickness-inducing camera-work), but it is effective as an intense adventure movie and the totally natural-looking effects prop up the characters who are basically operating without a plot most of the time. This isn't a perfect movie, but it is a ride; that cannot be denied. I only hope Paramount doesn't sequel-ize it and make themselves a franchise not unlike the Godzilla movies that inspired it.
http://www.movieswithmark.com