Cloverfield

A brilliant marketing campaign does not always lead to a good movie. For example The Blair Witch Project or Snakes on a Plane. Cloverfield had it all going for it. It had a prime spot for a teaser trailer- in front of Transformers- and it had a great viral campaign that was cheap, effective and maintained a level of secrecy that isn't seen much in movies these days. Having J.J Abrams name attached did not hurt at all either. Eventually they came out and said they had created a monster picture, which means this was going to be a mash up of Godzilla and The Blair Witch Project. The main concern for me then was whether I would get the pay off here that I did not get in The Blair Witch Project. I mostly avoided on-line games, clues, videos and theories because I wanted the sneak attack this movie was promising.

A party is happening for Rob(Michael Stahl David) because he got a job in Japan. I imagine it is a plush job because everyone at the party is a yuppie. The loft where the party is happening is nice and fancy; the people are all hot and dressed perfectly; the music is hip and everything is perfect. Wanting to document the night, Rob's brother, Jason(Mike Vogel) gets Hud(T.J Miller) to videotape the whole thing. Beth(Odette Yustman) shows up at the party and we are brought into a love story. Rob loves Beth; Beth loves Rob. They slept together, but Rob treated her badly after that because he was moving. We see some of the drama on camera, but not all of it. Beth storms out and partying continues. The camera shakes, the loft shakes and we hear something. At first it could just be an Earthquake but when it happens again, the party goers immediately think another terrorist attack. They run outside and then spend the rest of the movie running away from a sky-scraper sized monster who has tiny crab looking creatures falling of him that cause more havoc. Beth calls Rob because she is stuck, he must go get her even though it seems like a bad idea. Rob, Hud, Jason, Marlena and Lilly embark on a journey.

With an entire movie shot in a handheld camera, it operates with a suspension of disbelief because this kind of camera work has limitations. In order to give us a sense of immediacy we see everything the way Hud sees it. So, there are times when someone might not go back and get the camera, but in this movie he has to go get it. Also there are times when the director wants us to see what is behind them, so Hud stops and turns around to film something when he probably wouldn't. Or would he? This movie is very much in the Youtube generation. It is possible that someone would go back and film everything possible because they want to be on Youtube someday. Almost all video footage of 9/11 at first was of the handheld variety and how many crazy videos are shot with camera phones or by someone who just happened to have a video camera at the right time- think Rodney King. The handheld camera work does take some getting used to, but I believe it is effective here. The movie works because things just happen and we see them the way our characters see them. We may not care about the characters and their perfect hair, clothes, lives and jobs, but when we see glimpses of the creature the same way they do, it adds something.

The movie is funnier than you would imagine thanks to the running commentary from our "cameraman" Hud. He is funny but he is also the right amount of freaked out. He feels like someone we all know and love. He balances the being freaked out, with nice touches of humor and he is probably the one character the audiences gets to know, even though he has hardly any actual screen time. No back story on the creature is given; much like War of the Worlds, things just happen here. We don't know where it came from or what it is, just that it is tearing down buildings, killing people and causing complete mayhem. It is not a movie where we concern ourselves with the writing or the acting, because what we want is to be thrilled and it succeeds highly on that level. The scene with our characters walking through a dark, empty subway track is excruciatingly intense and then BAM, it gets action packed and scary as hell. It is a roller coaster of a movie that allows you to breathe for a few minutes before fully immersing you in another sequence with the characters on the run.

It is a relatively short movie, which is probably a good thing, but it eeks out great things in pretty much every minute. Some might complain that it took too long to get to the creature, but I think the set up worked because we all knew what was coming and it added to that build up. It prolonged the excitement. Also, there is a pay off here with one great shot of the creature, but it almost wasn't needed because of the great job they did giving us glimpses of the creature throughout the movie. It never seemed like the director was hiding the creature and the hand held stuff helped accent that because it became believable that the guy documenting everything would not get a perfect shot of the creature. We live in a world where if this happened, we would get footage like this. As one of the characters says "People will want to know what happened" and that rings very true in this movie. We want to know; in fact with as well as this movie accomplishes it's goal, we need to know what happened. And when we find out, we are not disappointed.

Final Grade:A-