First thing: You have to forget about the marketing campaign. More than any other Hollywood movie in recent memory, Cloverfield has been sold on its elaborate and involved tie-ins, almost to the exclusion of any promotion for the stars, the filmmakers, even to a certain extent the actual content of the film. If you’ve been closely following the short video clips and websites that relate to elements of the film’s back story, then you might know too much about what’s going on in a movie whose greatest strength is that it puts you right in the middle of a situation where no one knows anything.
Come into the movie cold and you’ll see a group of Manhattan twentysomethings throwing a going-away party for their friend Rob (Michael Stahl-David), about to take a new job in Japan (possibly to work for one of the companies whose fake websites have been hyping the movie, but don’t worry about that). The mundane relationship dramas among Rob and his buddies are all documented by the appealingly goofy Hud (T.J. Miller), who for the bulk of the movie wields the handheld camera that provides the viewer’s only perspective.
For 15 minutes or so, we’re watching what look like everyday home movies, complete with random cuts, jumpy camerawork and awkward framing, albeit home movies that happen to conveniently capture all the basic establishing info we need to follow the main characters. And then, as Rob and Hud and Rob’s brother Jason (Mike Vogel) are sitting on a fire escape going over their girl troubles, something happens, the something that’s in all the trailers and has been the focus of all the speculation about the movie: A giant monster attacks Manhattan, and all hell breaks loose.
After that, for all its cutting-edge marketing and people-record-their-entire-lives-on-their-camera-phones meta-commentary, Cloverfield has pretty much the same plot as every other end-of-the-world movie: Our heroes try to get to safety, but they’re willing to risk everything to save someone they care about (in this case it’s Rob’s more-than-friend Beth, trapped under some rubble in her apartment). What makes Cloverfield stand out from a Roland Emmerich movie is that it eliminates almost all of the big-picture storytelling (the politicians, the military, the scientists) and keeps its focus solely at ground level, on the average people whose lives are forever changed by this inexplicable and horrific event.
As Rob and his friends frantically make their way through the city, trying to save Beth and themselves, director Matt Reeves give us plenty of glimpses of the massive beast that’s ravaging Manhattan, eventually even having it stare directly into the camera. So this is not a movie that increases suspense by keeping its horrors hidden; any mystery as to what’s causing the destruction is cleared up quickly, although what the monster is and where it came from remains unrevealed, at least if you don’t start poking around online.
And, really, you shouldn’t: Cloverfield is most effective when the audience and the characters are on the same page, which is inevitable when the entire movie is shot from their perspective. The first-person style forces Reeves and writer Drew Goddard to forgo certain expected action-movie elements, including the aforementioned portrayals of authority figures, as well as much in the way of character development or expository dialogue. At times Cloverfield seems less like a movie than a theme-park motion simulator, but that’s not a complaint; like those rides, it puts you square in the middle of the action, only able to see what’s right in front of your face. If this perspective at first seems a bit limiting, it fully pays off in a masterful sequence that follows quiet tedium in an empty subway stop with a terrifying attack in the darkened tunnels by bat-like monsters that spawn from the main creature.
Certainly there are echoes of 9/11 here, most notably in the dust and stray bits of paper that billow through the air after the creature makes its first impact, but Cloverfield is less about 9/11 than it is about stopping and looking closely at those running, screaming people in disaster movies, the ones who aren’t Will Smith or Tom Cruise, who don’t just happen to have the right combination of connections and know-how to save the day. The day doesn’t get saved in Cloverfield, just as it often doesn’t in real life, and whether Will Smith or Tom Cruise is off somewhere coming up with a solution we never find out. “Whatever it is, it’s winning,” is the best that a soldier can come up with to tell our heroes by way of explanation. Whether the monster wins or loses, though, is irrelevant to them, as long as they can stay out of the way.
Cloverfield
*** 1/2
Michael Stahl-David, T.J. Miller, Jessica Lucas, Lizzy Caplan
Directed by Matt Reeves
Rated PG-13
Opens Friday