CLOVERFIELD
by Kevin Koehler
The hardest thing about being a film critic - besides fending off the adoring fans, autograph seekers, and loose women - is determining how much of a film you have to enjoy in order to recommend it. Does a film simply have to be more good than bad? What if it's mainly poor but preferable to standing in the rain? Is it a relative scale, the quality of a picture in comparison to its contemporaries? Does one recommend Cloverfield because it doesn't suck as bad as other action films?
A good idea is at the heart of this film, that idea being to make a vérité creature feature: Blair Witch meets Godzilla, in Hollywood pitch meeting parlance. Document the peaceful denizens of a city as they come under attack by a monster of indeterminate origin. Conceptually, this is an intriguing start. With some irony, the actual start of the film - its opening moments - exemplifies everything that's wrong with the picture: that the filmmakers decided to eschew their Good, Intriguing Idea in favor of the same tiresome shit.
Those opening moments take place in a posh, Columbus Circle apartment overlooking Central Park. He of perpetually-manicured-three-day-beard Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David) uses a video camera to record his sleeping ladyfriend, Beth (Odette Yustman), bed sheets covering her in the way they always are in PG-13 movies. She's also exceptional beautiful, looking far more like a model or an actress (same goes for basically everyone else in the film) than a woman any of us will wake up looking at in a posh, Columbus Circle apartment overlooking Central Park.
Flash-forward four weeks to a going away party. Rob is moving to Japan. Beth isn't. There's a new man in her life. They were just friends before, friends who slept together, but for some reason they never took that next step despite it being obvious these two are supposed to be together - they're the attractive protagonists in an action film, after all. It's all pretty boilerplate movie stuff. We're supposed to care. We don't.
Fate intervenes in the form of a giant monster who shows up unannounced to besiege Manhattan. Buildings crumble, chaos ensues, and the Statue of Liberty quite literally loses her head. Events are filtered through the viewfinder of Rob's video camera, wielded by comic relief Hud (T.J. Miller) and narrated by same. The couple we're supposed to care about but don't are split up, with Rob spending much of Cloverfield's brief running time (85 minutes) trying to recover Beth (verily, that day beneath the strategically placed sheets) and profess his belated, undying love before either of them get killed by the weird thing rampaging through all the Times Square product placement.
A faceless menace besieging the Big Apple? Sounds familiar, don't it? You're forgiven for assuming this film, while not necessarily being about 9/11, at least contains a commentary on it. You know, that event beleaguered Manhattanites kept saying was just like a movie. Despite the repeated (r)aping of 9/11 imagery clearly intended to remind audiences of that day - collapsing buildings, streets and air clouded with white debris, evacuations across the Brooklyn Bridge - Cloverfield has nothing to say about terrorism, the war on terror, Al Qaeda, George W. Bush, the Department of Homeland Security, Iraq, airline food, or really anything whatsoever. The "cinematic" elements of 9/11 have simply by reproduced for hollow, cinematic purpose. People, we are through the looking glass.
An acknowledgement: Some will argue that we should be able to have action movies set in a post-9/11 New York City where buildings fall and other such 9/11-y things happen and those movies not address 9/11. I say one day, but that day is not now. If you reference 9/11 it better mean something.
So what's good about Cloverfield? Mainly the action sequences, which are thrilling and well-staged. Putting aside the absurdity of someone filming certain life-threatening situations that would be better managed with two free hands, the documentary aesthetic lends these scenes immediacy and a genuine sense of menace. They are, generally-speaking, stirring, and much time passes without the desire to look at one's watch. Unfortunately, this naturalism doesn't extend to those times the characters speak to one another; when they discuss their problems and we're asked to empathize. Scenes featuring the monster are oddly the most realistic. Anyone who says they actually gave a shit about what happened to any of these people is either lying or easily pleased, welcoming any leading hand like a child lost at the mall. Given the Good, Intriguing Idea, you wonder why the filmmakers chose to populate their vérité creature feature with actors who look like Abercrombie & Fitch models (suspiciously over-lit in their trendy, Manhattan abodes) reciting hackneyed movie tropes. They remain tolerable, but nothing more.
Maybe this is good enough.
Interesting footnote: The filming of Cloverfield was shrouded in much secrecy. Before taking on its final title (taken from the street in Santa Monica where producer J.J. Abram's offices are located), the picture possessed the productions labels "Slusho" and "Cheese." The first trailers that played in theaters carried no title at all. Actors auditioned reading scenes that are not in the film and were required to commit to it before they were even given a script.
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