CLOVERFIELD is brought to you by many of the folks who bring us television’s “Lost”, which is a series not known for being either obvious or direct. The same can be said of their film, which offers a refreshing update on the classic genre of a big monster stomping a major metropolitan city into dust while the military fly jets around it.
The city is New York, and the circumstances are a big going-away party for Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who, in one of the many tidy shout-outs the film offers, is leaving to take a spiffy job in Japan, land of cinematic giant monsters who stomp big cities. The party is being thrown by his brother, Jason (Mike Vogel) and his significant other, Lily (Jessica Lucas). To document the proceedings, Jason has talked his pal, Hud (T.J. Miller), a hulking, dim-witted fellow, into using Rob’s borrowed camcorder to collect testimonials and best wishes from all the guests, something Hud plans to use to get an in with Marlena (Lizzy Caplan), the girl he’s crushing on who isn’t crushing back.
Hud, the antithesis of all that was Paul Newman in the film of that name, strikes out badly with Marlena, and Rob’s old girlfriend and one true love arrives and leaves with another man. The action and the fallout, though captured with complete ineptitude by Hud, is an interestingly voyeuristic experience, particularly when Hud’s social skills on every level prove to be more inept than his cinematic ones. Before this rather pedestrian tale of crossed romantic wires becomes tedious, the house is rocked, literally. The news says an earthquake. The partiers run into the street just in time to see the head from the Statue of Liberty land less than a block away. No one knows what is going on, Hud can barely hold onto the camera, and everyone starts running for the Brooklyn Bridge.
He ends up recording the entire adventure, which sets the conceit squarely into BLAIR WITCH PROJECT territory, with a few shout-outs there, too, including an “I’m so scared” by one of the characters. Unlike that film, though, in which the characters only had to follow a creek downstream to get to safety, but, annoyingly, never did, these characters are up against something with which a hiking manual can’t help them. It’s the size of a skyscraper, it’s not friendly, and it has a nasty habit of shedding tiny little creatures that are even more unfriendly as they scuttle about with multiple legs, claws, and a vicious set of something that bites hard.
There are no clear shots of it for most of the film, just bits and pieces that Hud gets while running the other way, and helicopter shots seen in bits of newscasts that can barely keep up with what is happening, much less offer any explanation of where this thing came from or what it wants, if anything. The audience is left to fill in the blanks.
Operating barely above the vegetative level, Hud provides the comic relief, with Miller doing impressive work as only the off-screen voice behind the camera. While the others scramble, he’s the one speculating government conspiracies.
It starts with an explanation that the footage, dubbed the eponymous Cloverfield, is government property, classified, and was found in what used to be Central Park. Yet the writing is sharp enough, the plotting slick enough, so that knowing where that camera ends up doesn’t make taking the journey of how it got there anything less than exhilarating. The hand-held style is dynamic, capturing the immediacy of what is happening with bad framing that heightens rather than distracts from the tension. And that tension doesn’t let up from the first awkward moments of reunited lovers at a party, right through to the final shot. The sudden realization that rats are silently fleeing from something unknown in a tunnel is just as terrifying as the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge, wires snapping and concrete buckling beneath swarms of pedestrians fleeing Manhattan.
As buildings crumble, taking the social construct of civilization with them, CLOVERFIELD gets down to its real business, and it’s not explaining where the beast came from. Rather it’s teasing out of the mindless fear and the pumping adrenalin the essential nature of being human. There are some rather large suspensions of disbelief to hurdle over in the plot, but in the final analysis, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that is seems reasonable that a man will go back into a city overrun with monsters and the military fighting a futile battle to kill them in order to save the woman he loves. And another man will continue to hit on a woman for whom he is smitten in his own rudimentary, inarticulate way, even though the monsters are ravening, the military is throwing all its firepower at it, and the object of his desire has made her disinterest more than manifest. There is something primal about it, visceral, this overriding need to connect. Or maybe it’s just Richard Dawkins’ selfish genes flooding the common-sense areas of the brain with hormones in order to replicate themselves. Either way, it’s fascinating.
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