Harry at Ain't It Cool said that Cloverfield "is a bold genre-reinvention unlike anything we’ve ever seen before". What a crock. If anything, Cloverfield is a throwback to when horror films threw away their own internal logic so they could shock you at the end. There was an endless parade of such things in the Sixties and Seventies and they oh so sucked. Cloverfield is an homage to them. And it, too, sucks.
The most tragic thing about the film is that it didn't have to be this way. I understand that the desire was to make a giant monster film from the perspective of people just trying to survive. Fine. But let's not pretend that this hasn't been done before. Has the world forgotten Signs? (Well, maybe...) Or, a finer example, Spielberg's War of the Worlds?
While neither of those involved a giant rampaging creature, both avoided the usual POV of such films, namely that of following the military and scientists fighting the alien invasion. Obviously J.J. Abrams (producer) and Matt Reeves (director) wanted to do the same with Cloverfield, only they blew it. By going with the "found film" gimmick, they locked themselves into a single camera POV and had to twist the nature of time and space to be sure that the camera was always where it needed to be when it needed to be. Even Blair Witch (same "found film" concept) had the good sense to have two cameras.
There really isn't a story. The film is a string of jack-in-the-box "surprises". If there's a lull, brace yourself, something nasty is going to leap out. There is no building of dread, otherwise observant humans just somehow miss this humongous thing standing behind them. As a result, there is no horror, no suspense, no really giving a damn. Of course there's going to be something nasty in that dark place because, duh, that's where nasty things live. Why is the huge monstrosity shedding little monstrosities? Well, of course, it's to make sure that there is nowhere the director can't make something leap out of somewhere and eat someone.
I wanted to feel involved in the notion of a guy willing to risk all in order to save a girl who has been his friend forever, and whom he now believes he's in love with. To me, that is an inherently compelling storyline, almost Brigadoon in nature, that notion that you have one last chance to be with the one you love after you threw her away. But Cloverfield doesn't earn that involvement because neither boy nor girl are interesting enough for us to give a good bubbly burp for.
So I didn't buy the setup. I also didn't buy that: 1) an almost compete stranger would join the quest; 2) generic babe in high heels would go along in her high heels; 3) shaky camera dude would follow along and continue filming!
Those, for starters, are things I didn't buy into, with either my heart or my head. Especially my head. My head kept noticing things like: Hey, when that massive explosion happened we saw all the lights go out. So why are the lights still on in the apartment, out on the street, etc.? I can tell you that one because it really doesn't give anything away, but others might so I'll restrain myself. Suffice to say that logic, consistency, and reality all check out.
Yes, it's strange discussing "reality" when we're talking about a movie about a giant monster on a romp through Manhattan, but the entire point of "found film" is to instill an unreal situation with a sense of reality. (See the aforementioned Blair Witch.) And beyond that, film is about heightened reality. Filmed reality is boring. Even documentary filmmakers understand that, which is why a good documentary is such a beautiful work of craft and art.
The choice of doing this all via a single camera has other issues. Most of the time we can't see a damn thing except pavement, wall, dust, sky, wide-open eyes, repeat. And for a presumably small digital camera (implied because the found "film" is identified as an SD chip) this thing has got a killer manual zoom because it keeps zooming in/out in/out in/out in precisely the way that digital camera zooms don't. I got over the shaky camera induced motion sickness, but I never for a moment believed I was looking at home movie footage. The product placements alone ruined the effect. (Just how big of a sponsor of this film was Nokia?)
What also ruined the effect was how spot on perfect the sound was. I had no idea that small, hand-held, digital video cameras were capable of surround-sound 5.1 DTS encoding. If I'm supposed to be seeing things from the POV of these lifeless and dull characters, shouldn't I also share their hearing?
What makes this all sad is that it didn't have to be this way because in the final analysis, Cloverfield was murdered by its gimmick. This easily could have been filmed in a more conventional manner without losing any sense of intimacy. Indeed, it could have become more intimate because we actually could have seen and identified more readily with the characters. The gimmick, therefore, becomes a conceit and we know that nothing good comes from conceit.
Thus, the highpoint of seeing the film was before it began, with that nifty teaser for Star Trek. Alas, it, too, is going to be an J.J. Abrams project, and that name, when attached to a film project, now fills me with dread.
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