This Weekend’s Movies: “Cloverfield”

For some reason or other, American cinema doesn’t really do gigantic monsters very well. Maybe it’s because we’re such a massive, monolithic presence in the world we can’t imagine being dwarfed by anything. Maybe it’s because collectively we only had one good giant-monster idea in us (King Kong) and we shot that load seventy years ago. Whatever the case, our most charismatic monsters have been human-sized—Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the aliens of Alien. Excluding Kong, we’ve never created a giant monster with the charisma of Godzilla. Hell, we’ve never created one on par with Gamera.

What was my point again? Oh yeah, Cloverfield. This movie was producer J.J. Abrams’s stab at creating an American answer to Godzilla. Is he successful? Well, what do you think? I’m profiling the movie, aren’t I? Anyway, the movie unfolds in pure Godzilla fashion–a gigantic monster emerges from the briny deeps to wreck havoc on Manhattan before the military blows it oblivion. Seems simple enough. Unfortunately, Abrams, director Matt Reeves, and writer Drew Goddard decided to put a (sigh) modern spin on the story by having it filmed by a hand-held video camera wielded by a kid attending a buddy’s going-away party.

And this brings us to the massive sucking sound that is Coverfield. Cheap and easy digital filmmaking has apparently scared the living crap out of many filmmakers since about half of Hollywood wants to make movies that say important things about our newly-YouTubeized lifestyles. And perhaps there is a trenchant movie waiting to be made about that, but Cloverfield ain’t it. Without any interesting subtext, the cinema-verite style of Cloverfield really only serves to frustrate the hell out of the viewer and make you shout over and over again at the screen ”What the fuck just happened! Raise the camera, you douchebag!”

The douchebag in question is Hud, one of five 20-somethings whom we follow through this story of New York’s apocalypse. Hud has thrown a going-away party for his buddy Rob, who is taking a job in Japan. Also attending the party is Rob’s brother Jason, and some chicks, Lily and Marlena. All of these people are about as vapid as a J. Crew ad, and the party scenes are easily the most painful to watch, simply because I wanted all these people to die. Then a monster attacks! Yay! Good Cloverfield!

Our five core douchebags try to escape Manhattan, but the monster trashes the Brooklyn Bridge, which pretty much canks that idea. Then Rob gets a frantic call from his girlfriend Beth, who is trapped in her father’s Columbus Circle apartment, and the five (well, four—Jason catches his lunch when the Bridge collapses) set out to rescue Beth. This plotline is reminiscent of the little-seen Miracle Mile, in which Anthony Edwards races through a nocturnal Los Angeles to rescue a woman he’s just met from an imminent nuclear attack. The main difference being that Anthony Edwards’s natural, everyman quality makes this Quixotic feat believable, whereas the bland, model-pretty douchebags are too insubstantial to register any feeling that complex. These are people who spout dialogue like, “I’m glad you came back for me, otherwise I’d be, like, totally dead.” Yeah, totally. Not partially or incrementally dead. Totally. And when the douchebags end up in a makeshift military hospital and see a corpse with an exploded torso, Hud reacts with a heartfelt “Oh. Gross.” As opposed to my response, which would have been What the bloody fucking hell happened to that guy?

Okay, so our main characters suck. Can Reeves and Goddard screw up this film in any other ways? Why, as a matter of fact yes. For some reason or other they elect to make Hud inexperienced with camcorders, so for every glimpse we have of what’s going on around them, we get countless blurry, shaky images. Hud says he’s filming everything because “someday people will need to know what happened” (right, ‘cause they might forget it was a gigantic monster that leveled New York City). Yet he can’t even hold the camera still when he ends up with the perfect vantage to film the military’s penultimate attack on the monster with F/A-18s. Looking down at the action, with an unobstructed view, he still whips the camera back and forth between the attack on the monster and the rest of the douchebags cowering and screaming. Dude, which of those two things do you think is more important to preserve for posterity?

The handheld cam conceit also limits the action onscreen, since, logically, the main characters can’t be constantly running away from the monster for the whole movie. Reeves and Goddard solve this problem by having the monster shed dog-sized parasitic arthropods, which somehow should be a lot scarier than they end up onscreen (they look like some lesser-beasties from Starship Troopers). They do, however, inject some jarring gore into the picture as their bite causes the aforementioned torso explosions. Dunno why.

Cloverfield has caught some flack for presenting the destruction of Manhattan without any regard to how many of its scenes are reminiscent of the carnage of 9/11. As someone who was in New York on that day, I’m generally pretty sensitive anything that brings back the feelings of terror, helplessness, and loss we felt at what unfolded. But Cloverfield isn’t adept enough at transcending its own silliness long enough to really evoke those memories. Besides, the original Godzilla—Gojira was its actual title–was released in 1954—less than ten years after Tokyo had been firebombed halfway into oblivion, not to mention the two atomic devices dropped on Japan. It may be cathartic, it may not, but at some point you just have to surrender your cities and landmarks to the giant monsters on the silver screen.

Now if we could only get some better giant monsters…