Manhattan Monster Project
What is Cloverfield?
Filmed through a video camera carried around by participants in the catastrophe it depicts, Cloverfield has drawn understandable comparisons to The Blair Witch Project. But where the earlier movie was an interesting experiment, Cloverfield works as a full-blown feature film. Where Blair Witch meandered
through the spooky woods with its film student auteurs, who gradually
became the unwanted subject of their own home movie, Cloverfield is
masterfully edited and paced, making the jumps in time and gaps in
space appear as the fumbling uncertainty of amateurs who thought they
were making a video record of their friend’s going-away party.
They
are all going away, as it transpires. The party thrown by the affluent
twenty-something New Yorkers, a “Sex and the City” crowd if there ever
was, ends early and abruptly. Loud thuds and enormous explosions cut
short the festivities.
Car alarms are triggered across
Manhattan by the shudders. The skyscrapers go dark. Cable news reports
“a possible earthquake” in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty.
Within minutes the partygoers have a vantage the news anchor lacks when
the face of Lady Liberty wheels through the air and smashes against the
pavement outside their loft.
The first half-hour of Cloverfield is
a descendant of the little movies Andy Warhol once made of his Factory
crowd, but better edited and composed. It cap- tures the
less-than-scintillating chatter of the beautiful people in real time,
the camera mugging of people socialized in part by bad television. It
also raises questions of privacy in our increasingly transparent
society. What if the camera guy stumbles onto an intimate, embarrassing
or hurtful situation? Not everyone wants everything they do turning up
on YouTube.
The potential cinematic boredom of the party
scene, with lots of talk but little of consequence, is ameliorated by
its realism and hurled quickly along through kinetic editing. The
viewfinder never lingers long on scenes that don’t require a second
look. A sense for the main characters is established in fast, fleeting
strokes before the monster strikes.
New York has been the subject of assaults by film monsters in the past. The archetype, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, was
a 1950s Ray Bradbury story about a dinosaur newly hatched and running
amok on Times Square. Atomic testing was the culprit, raising the
reptile that had lain dormant in its egg for millions of years.
Cloverfield’s monster
is an inconceivable creature, many-armed and scuttling along like a
spider or a crab. It belongs more to H.P. Lovecraft than any museum of
natural history. We glimpse little of it through the jittery vid-cam
and that’s just as well. The suggestion of its slithery, gunmetal gray
flesh is enough. Accompanying the thing are little creepy crawly
minions that scamper
after their victims. They at least can be killed with an ax handle or a
club. The U.S. military is having a tougher time stopping the big
monster. Will they be forced to level Manhattan? As unsettling as the
monster itself is its inexplicability. There is no setup for its
arrival and no answers in the final frame. As our band of
twenty-somethings braves the shadowy dangers of Manhattan to rescue the
friend left behind, the motor-mouthing member of the party throws a
pocketful of theories against the wall. Maybe it’s like the prehistoric
fish discovered the other year off Madagascar? Maybe it’s
extraterrestrial? Or a government experiment gone wrong? Producer J.J.
Abrams (“Lost”), who is receiving most of the credit for Cloverfield, supervised a relatively low budget but visually effective film. The limited scope and depth of a single video camera becomes Cloverfield’s strength.
The exploding towers sending tsunamis of smoke and debris down the
Manhattan canyons are reminiscent of 9/11 news footage. But in many
scenes tension is established the old-fashioned way, as the cast of
unprepared characters makes its way along a dark subway tunnel by the
feeble emergency bulbs and the fitful glow of the camera.
There
are unforgettable touches. An army of rats swarms down the subway
tunnel, terrified, ignoring the twentysomethings and scrambling with
better sense than many of Cloverfield’s human characters to get out of harm’s way.
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