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Cloverfield

Cloverfield conjures up an aesthetic and emotion not unlike that of the Bela Lugosi era: a monster movie supreme where what you see, and what the film leaves up to the imagination, are both equally terrifying. But it is a monster movie for the Mac generation: unabashedly hip, full of attractive New Yorkers, abetted by some of the best CGI we’ve seen to date. Our grandparents, who may have thrilled in 1931 to Lugosi’s Dracula, could never foresee what the Monster Movie would become.

But perhaps neither could we. Cloverfield works because of its moment in history, and for that reason alone it is worth the eleven dollars, plus whatever popcorn costs these days. Undeniably, producer J.J. Abrams’s 9/11 movie, Cloverfield extrapolates upon the question of what would happen if something really bad went down in New York. The terror of a smoke-filled Manhattan street is a particular and current affliction, and director Matt Reeves really works the horror of inchoate Manhattan Island to maximum effect. Perhaps to a fault, as some reviewers have pointed out, because there’s nothing more manipulative than a loud bang outside, on an otherwise quiet day in New York. But in my opinion, the horror of terrorism is perhaps most successfully tackled in terms of these outsized metaphors, the impossibly-horrific monster that knocks down buildings. Those too queasy to accept 9/11 allusions beware, but you are missing some of the incredible power of movies to let us relive, without the terrible consequences, some of our most pristine and instinctual emotions.

Cloverfield's use of handheld camerawork to tell its story harkens back to another recent horror success story, namely The Blair Witch Project (although the fact that this is “found footage” really calls into question the ability of your average Sony film-stock to withstand the collapse of New York City…but I digress). What I feel was gimmicky in Blair Witch seems to work much better here. A crappy camera wielded by an incompetent cameraman does pretty well in capturing the absolute chaos of a New York City disaster, and the frequent teases we get of the monster (a claw here … a toothy snarl there … was that its shoulder?) really do explain why the amateur-lens perspective deepens and doesn’t distract from the film’s dread: we only get to see what the camera sees, and though it scares the life out of us, we want to see more.

What we do get to see are some of the best rip-roaring, building-smashing, what-the-$@!#-was-that special effects ever caught on film. The monster itself, and the destruction it causes in New York, are nothing less than technically wondrous. This is a monster for the Netflix age, a monster for those of us who have seen all the movie monsters of the past: there isn’t a claw, tentacle, fang, antenna, or bulging pustule missing. Through most of Cloverfield, we are only allowed glimpses, and this is how it should be, rifting on the idea that what the audience can imagine is far more terrifying than what is actually there. Cloverfield may be the first movie to come along in a long while where what is actually there comes pretty damn close.

Written by: Matt Nathanson

Reviewers Rating: 8.5
Reader's Rating: 9.67
Reader's Votes: 6

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