'Cloverfield' is Monstrously Scary Home Movie
Posted on: Friday, 2 May 2008, 03:00 CDT
By Steven Uhles
Succeeding because of its ability to recognize and then twist expectations, Cloverfield is a giant monster movie a la Godzilla that actually works better on home video and relegates its feature creature to a secondary role.
Formatted as an amateur video found in the ruins of Central Park after an incredibly destructive monster rampage, the film is a voyeur's view of how people respond to turmoil.
Although the turmoil is clearly caused by the monster and the crablike spawn it drops around the city, the movie could as easily have been about war, natural disaster or, more pointedly, given the film's Gotham locale, 9-11.
More thoughtful than the ordinary monster movie, it depends on character growth and the dramatic elements of love, grief, fear and courage.
Cloverfield focuses on three men and three women as they try to navigate New York during the attack. The home-video gimmick, which certainly must have caused some queasiness on the front row of multiplexes, allows the filmmakers to be subtle in what might otherwise have been a movie about special effects.
The main monster isn't really seen until late in the film, and the scurrying parasites it drops are never truly seen at all. Instead, like Jaws and Alien before it, Cloverfield works off the premise that anything left to the audience's imagination will be far more frightening than a constructed creature.
This is no quiet character piece with occasional monster mayhem. It's an authentic action film with little letup after the premise is set, with a few authentically frightening moments, most notably a sequence in the subway tunnels and another on Brooklyn Bridge.
Cloverfield is not without flaws. The home-video device does begin to wear thin after a while, particularly when the shaking of the hand-held camera becomes severe.
Likewise, the character of Hud, who serves as ad hoc narrator, comic relief and cameraman, seems tonally separated from the rest of the cast. While the others seem to react in a reasonably realistic (given the outlandish premise) fashion, he appears to be an outtake from a teen comedy, and not a particularly good one.
Still, stars must be given for the boldness of the experiment and its relative success.
Source: Augusta Chronicle, The
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