Cloverfield

Rating: 6/10 (22 March 2008)

The kaiju genre is one of the best inventions ever dreamed up in Japanese soil. It literally translates as "strange monster", and that's exactly what it is, movies centered around the sudden arrival of a giant-sized, spectacularly ugly and scary monster in the middle of Tokyo. Staples of the genre are crumbling buildings, the giant foot of the beast stepping on a poor jap that stumbled while running, mayhem and generally useless military activity. I think the first Asian movie I ever saw was Mothra, which is about a giant butterfly monster invoked by the strange chantings of miniature twin geishas. Of course, the most famous kaiju monster is the reptilian anti-hero Godzilla. On his first movie he's a destroyer of humanity, yet on subsequent films he saves Earth from a gallery of creatures, presumably so he can earn back his title as its main nuclear nightmare. In 1998, there was an unfortunate American version of Godzilla which pretty much was an attempt at Jurassic Park on NYC. The movie featured an unrealistic evacuation of Manhattan. Now that US has been through 9/11, I think they've sort of earned the right to make a Godzilla movie. After all, Godzilla is nothing but a '50s metaphor for nuclear horror.
The catch here is the Blair Witch Project gimmick, in which the movie is actually "found" home video material from a camera with seemingly unlimited batteries and capacity, in which a group of friends go from late-night partying to kaiju chaos. It's a great catch, actually. Like in Blair Witch, we get to know the protagonists before seeing them in dangerous situations. Our friends here are saying good-bye to Rob, who's trying to return to a relationship with Beth, and the main survivor group is composed of his friend Hub (the one who "documents" all the misadventures, a nerdish, annoying, comic relief presence), Marlene, the best character in the movie (it goes without saying she's a wino), and a hot black chick. I can't be arsed to remember her name. They find themselves in the disorder of the (slightly more realistic than in Godzilla '98) Manhattan evacuation, and suddenly decide they're gonna help Rob find her girlfriend Beth, who's trapped and suffocating, somewhere in the island that's being destroyed by a reptile the size of the Empire State. Smart bloody thinking.
As you're probably guessing by now, I wasn't too in love with this movie. Its main problem was that, despite the superficial pains they took to make it a "realistic" witness home video (the recording over previous Coney Island footage, the date and time, the opening government disclaimer), it played exactly like a by-the-numbers Hollywood movie. Worse, actually. The characters in any teen slasher are more logical than these ones. If some guy loses his nerve and decides that the best course of action (instead of, you know, immediately calling his parents and close relatives) is to run into the danger area looking for some short-breasted chick who's probably dead, I think his mates have a moral obligation to knock him unconscious and save him. I can't believe in characters who are faced with a gigantic lizard and don't want to save themselves. That's not what's being a hero is all about. That's definitively not what a fireman was doing during 9/11. That's being a tool in a poor scriptwriter's mind. And some military guy suddenly decides that their suicidal tendencies are worth encouraging? Come on.
Now, technically, this movie is so cool it's a shame it got lost in a bad script. Even if it has been shot in obviously high quality, the constant jerking of the camera (although, gimme a break, this is not seizure-inducing for anyone who has ever watched an '80s videoclip) and the filters made me believe I was watching a first-person account of a giant monster tearing down a city. The way the monster is introduced is clever enough - we see the inmediate consequences of its rampage, and eventually (with a little help from the parasites that climb off him) we get to know it in increasingly irksome detail. But none of this technical (and creative) wonder is any good if the story the filmmakers are telling us has so many logical holes and unrealistic behavior. There are a million plot devices that could realistically set the survivor group apart from military aid and into the claws of the monster. There's no need to turn the protagonists into self-righteous cardboared figures who mumble Garfield jokes (ok, I laughed at that one) while wandering into the unknown. Basically, why do we need a comic relief cameraman? Cloverfield doesn't trust the audience to be smart enough to endure the "found" footage without a C-3PO hanging around? So it wants to be realistic, yet everyone is a bloody stereotype? I'll admit it, it's a concept that's easy to explain and sell, but hard to actually film in a realistic manner. I'd say the closest they can come to make a great kaiju in this postmodern style is to combine footage from news and various recording devices into one edited narrative. That way, it wouldn't look so staged and it would offer a bird's eye view of the story with the added "reality" element. Of course, that's not what Cloverield, Abrams and company try to do, but I'd recommend a change in priorities. Maybe for the sequel. Who knows?