The geist in the machine.

Rating: 6/10 (2 March 2008)

Something is happening in escapist genre film-making, can you feel it? My zeitgeist gland started to vomit chemical nausea into my body twice recently and the reasons are obvious  like you my friend. It's this notion that escapist genre fare is starting to appropriate the language of cultural trauma in order to entertain us and a new kind of blockbuster is the by-product  a style in its infancy that is flirting with immorality. This is the kind of flirting that unchecked can lead to a violation of the audience and what it understands to be normal in terms of how it should get it rocks off. Be careful says I because like a dirty old uncle that whips out the little gentleman for his unsuspecting niece, the consequences are a potential warping of what we consider to be harmless fun  something David Director and Sidney Scribe must ultimately take responsibility for.
Rambo was at it recently, hijacking Spielberg's D-Day realism approach from Saving Private Ryan to murder the Burmese Militia. In Spielberg's film the technique had been used to strip warfare of its Technicolor entertainment value and give the battle scenes an unsentimental air of reportage. Stallone reversed this idea by applying the same tools to sate the blood lust of his seen it all before ghoulish adolescent audience  a corruption of the original style. What used to be fun about genre movies with high death rates and judicious dollops of wanton destruction is that it was escapism  larger than life, utterly ridiculous and therefore completely safe to enjoy.
Cloverfield may be a better film than Rambo but it uses the same methodology to get it jollies. Here its 9/11 that gets plundered to add an uncomfortable real world sensibility to the old monster on the rampage movie. Filmed from the perspective of a single camcorder, events unfold in fits and shaky hand held starts with the beast periodically glimpsed whenever the terrified documentarian gets the chance. The characters aren't up to much and are irrelevant in any event but their panic feels genuine enough and its in these scenes of fleeing, glancing upward to see a building topple and the like that déjà vu hits you in a very unpleasant way. One scene in particular  the collapse of a apartment block and the unfolding dust cloud is a direct lift from Al-Queda's greatest hits. This of course is a very effective device to make something absurd genuinely mortifying but when popular entertainment starts to play on its audience's real fears by appealing to direct experience rather than the base instincts that traditionally were its bread and butter (you didn't need to have seen real footage of a shark eat a man to buy into Jaws  the premise was primal in its efficacy) then arguably a line has been crossed. There's no doubting the filmmakers exploitative glee here or the skill in which the enveloping disaster is juxtaposed with the couple's day out recorded on the same tape and occasionally 'cut' to in the gaps in recording, to produce emotional punch but there's an air of cynicism about the execution. Fun doesn't seem well, fun any more.