Review: Cloverfield (2008)

Cloverfield (2008) 85m

With the proliferation of mobile phones and pocket-sized digital cameras,
it seems impossible for anything in the 21st century to go undocumented.
When the Hindenburg crashed in 1937 the event was immortalized with a
single iconic image of it crippled and aflame despite the high presence of
newsreel cameras, but when hijacked jet airliners plowed into the World
Trade Center in 2001, news agencies found that they could edit
comprehensive coverage of the disaster from citizens' personal video
cameras. The brilliantly realized premise of CLOVERFIELD is to use the
unquestionably 'real' credentials of amateur home video to frame the
perspective of an imaginary event on a scale seen only in films like
GODZILLA, KING KONG, and INDEPENDENCE DAY. It's a gimmick that's
been done before, most notably in 1999's THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT,
but for reasons of budget more than aesthetics. The point of such strategy
is to exploit the home-made look of amateur video to present fiction as if
it were documentary. With the huge FX budget of CLOVERFIELD and the
quality of the cinematography, there's no way it was ever going to
succeed as realism, but as a cinematic conceit it holds up very well. In fact,
the 'rehearsed spontaneity' of the camerawork is probably too authentic for
many viewers (there were complaints of seasickness from some audience
members after seeing the camera shaking on big cinema screens).

The opening title of the film reveals 'Cloverfield' to be the code name used
for a military operation implemented during an attack on Manhattan, which
is almost an in-joke, as the film itself was known only as 'Untitled J. J. Abrams
Project' until a short time before its theatrical release, allowing those who
were first in line to share the same sense of discovery as the protagonists in
the film. Early speculation was that the film might have been a GODZILLA
remake, so the tipoffs early in the story (a closeup of a Japanese flag and
news that a ship is the first victim of the invader) are more likely to be
misinformation jokes rather than homage. Following Joe Bob Briggs' "first
rule of drive-in moviemaking" that anyone can die at any time, the team
behind CLOVERFIELD pulls no punches, and any doubts about exactly what
happens in the film's final moments can be addressed by referring back to
the opening few seconds. By populating the cast with lesser-known actors,
everyone becomes as expendable as any cross-section of the population
during a random cataclysmic event. Viewers may become so absorbed with
the seemingly on-the-fly style of the film that they may not even notice the
total absence of a background score (a necessary condition of filming it on
a camcorder - presumably if Abrams had produced STAR WARS we wouldn't
have heard laser blasts hitting spaceships either). Instead, CLOVERFIELD
uses a soundtrack of musique concrete, driving the story along with booming
footfalls, the hysteria of crowds and the clash and clatter of the military in
constant battle with the enemy. Similarly, the film/video does its job so
effectively that you might not even notice the level of language being
used by every character within earshot. If it had been me holding that
camera on the firing line, the expletives would have been well beyond
a PG rating.

sburridge RemoveThis @hotmail.com








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