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Poseidon Takes Manhattan
By bukkhead | January 18, 2008
FILM REVIEW: ‘CLOVERFIELD’
Written by Drew Goddard
Directed by Matt Reeves
Rated PG-13
85 mins.
I’d been looking forward to Cloverfield since I saw the trailer for it at last summer’s Transformers. I went to the web, got into the viral marketing thing. I bought a Slusho t-shirt. I made a page for my blog about it. I was into it. And I should know better, because 9 times out of 10, movies just don’t live up to this kind of hype. This, however, was that 10th time.
Someone smarter than me described Cloverfield as a disaster movie, and thankfully, I got that in my head before I went and saw it, which was exactly right. This is not a horror film, a monster movie. This is not Godzilla meets Blair Witch, as much as superficial evaluations would have you believe. This is an edge-of-your-seat thriller, a survival picture.
That’s a cliché, and pretty much the only one you’re going to get from Cloverfield. This is a movie that doesn’t do the things you’re used to. I’m not saying it’s innovative, or experimental even. The entire film is shot on a home video camera, which has been done before. But all of the things we take for granted, the filmic language we automatically expect to speak when we communicate with a movie: it’s all gone. This is refreshing, if only because everything really is a surprise. Cast adrift from the usual movie iconagraphy, you’re as shaken as the characters are, just as frightened.
The basic premise is that Rob’s friends throw hiim a going-away party, and that night Manhattan is attacked by… something. You get glimpses of it, but the primary motivation is not an X-Files quest to discover what is going on or why it is happening. Instead, Rob must make it across town to save someone. Along the way, the city is being ripped to pieces.
That this is all from the point of view of a personal home video camera, creator JJ Abram’s takes advantage of by interspersing bits of old film over which this new film is being recorded. (I say creator JJ Abrams because, despite Drew Goddard’s excellent script, everyone’s seeing this movie because it’s produced by the guy who did Lost and Alias and the third Mission Impossible movie. And the Next Star Trek Movie. And Felicity). Juxtaposing Rob’s date at Coney Island with the documentation of a rescue attempt is just good, solid storytelling. This is a movie that does not get lost in it’s own passion.
Which is probably why it stood up to my expectations, and after literally half a year of anticipation, still delivered what I was hoping for. The lesson here is that no matter how amazing an idea is, whether it’s the soul of a story or just the impetus of a marketing campaign, everything else had better be rock solid. Cloverfield might be called gimmicky by some, but it’s got more going on than just the gimmick. Don’t be distracted by the marketing gimmick monster—the meat is in the movie.
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