Cloverfield

Cloverfield is a movie with many, many problems—and although I saw it only a few hours ago, it is not aging well.

The premise of the movie is simple: Godzilla meets Youtube. This premise is also stupid, as a few seconds of thought will show: a special-effects picture sits uncomfortably within a very up-close portrayal of a group of friends. Take away the gimmick (everything on screen is "found" footage taken on video camera), and one is left with the not-so-bad idea of a monster movie which focuses more on personal tension and group dynamics than the monster. There are films like this, no? I'm thinking of Night of the Living Dead especially, but experts in the genre will doubtless name more.

The most obvious precursor of this film is The Blair Witch Project, which I admit I rather like, but which is, in the most important way, nothing like this film. Blair Witch is not a special effects movie in the least. Cloverfield balances a Bruckheimer scenario with a structure inimical to that scenario. Granted, that is the "angle" here—but it doesn't work. The counterintuitive remains so.

The best shots in the film are the glimpses of the monster down long avenues, partially blocked by buildings, and of destruction that cannot be made out very clearly. Basically: the film does chaos very well. This is to be expected, as even a wedding video made on handheld camera can be very disorienting and chaotic. But—and here's the catch—the handheld camera totally fails to make interesting the kind of personal interactions that become obligatory within that format.

For what it's worth, I also did not like the monster. And the film's knowledge of New York City was annoyingly wrong.

Now, the first thirty minutes of this film, derided by Manohla Dargis in her uncomprehending, pretentious review, happen to be the best in the movie. At times, I wish I had written it. The initial scene-setting—here's what genius—fails to set up anything of interest. The characters are vacant, their problems are petty, they lack all insight, etc. Ms. Dargis sees this as somehow a mistake, an accident. If we are supposed to care about these characters, then, yes, it's a mistake—and there are signs of "feelings" that crop up later in the movie that suggest, yes, this film has made a serious misjudgment of my investment in it. Nonetheless, the bland, at times pitch-perfect inanity of yuppie dialogue is (although a bit theatrical) among the better writing in recent films. It's a party I'm glad to leave, and a group of people I don't mind seeing killed (although the women are unbelievably beautiful and also a bit of a liability for the film's realism)—but as a 30-minute short film about idiots and their lives, Cloverfield's opening scenes are a kind of accidental genius.

Unlike I am Legend, Cloverfield never made me feel like New York City was the very scary place that in reality it is. Nor did I feel, as with The Birds or Dawn of the Dead, as though the monster(s) not being there would have still left an interesting drama (maternal issues and suburban capitalist brain death, respectively). If in I am Legend, I felt sometimes, "I wouldn't go into that doorway even if there weren't zombies there!", Cloverfield failed even to make a swarm of subway rats frightening, which I wouldn't have thought possible.