Warning – there are spoilers here… you have been warned!  If you holler at me for giving away the secrets of the movie I’ll have your house flattened.  Remember, it’s still alive!  And they’re still making Slusho!

Okay, so I’ve read a huge amount about this movie… since I saw the trailer last fall, I’ve been ready and waiting for this one.  Just like Newscoma, I love me a good monster movie, and that’s exactly what this was – a really rockin’ monster movie for 2008.  One thing I can say for Abrams et al, the Viral Video really worked for me.  In fact, I loved all the sites built just for this.  Tagruato, TIDO & Slusho! all did a good job of building the backstory.  So, if you followed the viral then you knew more than most of the people in the theater with you, but you still don’t know a lot.  Mainly because none of the viral entities were mentioned in the movie.  That is, except for Jason’s Slusho! teeshirt that he was wearing at the party in the very beginning.  And, speaking of the backstory, let’s go ahead and address that issue first since it is probably the biggest complaint I’ve read about Cloverfield.  The thing you have to keep in mind when you see this movie is that it is not a traditional movie.  There is no layout at the beginning, a lot of building up, then a big climax, and finally a neat tidy ending with the hero and the good girl kissing as they walk off into the sunset.  If that’s what you want, then this is not your movie, trust me!  This movie is set up from the beginning as a piece of evidence found at the site of a government classified project named Cloverfield.  It is a vignette of life.  A documentary, if you will, just like you have in your bookshelves at home of Christmases and Birthdays, and all the milestones of your life.  That’s all this is, basically.  The film of a day in the life of some anonymous people you’ve never met… but it just so happens that it was a day that went terribly wrong and ended with a big bang!  That’s why we care, that and the fact that we are all voyeurs in a way.  But, you need to keep this in mind as you watch.  It’ll help you understand and process what is basically a monster movie wrapped in a different take on moviemaking – the viewer as voyeur, looking at a stranger’s life, taking away impressions of that life with no facts for their basis. 

Now, the movie… it opens with footage being taken of Rob, after a hookup with Beth.  Only, it’s a little more than a hookup, but Rob isn’t saying that.  Rob already knows that he might be going to Japan for work, and Beth is encouraging him about that opportunity.  Then the footage date changes to May, and Jason, Lilly and Hud (Rob’s brother, his fiancee, and Rob’s best friend) as they are preparing for a going-away party for Rob.  Yes, he took the job in Japan, and this is his last night in America… accurate in more ways than he knows, yet.  The first 20 min. introduces the key characters in the movie – Lilly, Rob, Beth, Hud – and builds a little of their back-stories, but not much because you never get all of it, you have to make assumptions which is what I think the makers of this movie wanted.  About 20 min. in, things finally get going, when there’s a gigantic explosion in lower Manhattan and the partygoers all rush up to the roof of Rob’s building to see what’s up!  That’s when stuff starts flying from lower Manhattan and all hell starts breaking loose.  The news is talking about a capsized tanker in NY Harbor, which you can only assume is the location where things went wrong for NYC.  The party moves outside because, you know, we can drink later, but right now we need to work on this whole self-preservation thing.  As they all hit the sidewalk, here comes the head of the Statue of Liberty, flying and rolling down the street.    That’s really a powerful image, I’m saying, and it really gets your attention that whatever this is does intend to do lots of harm.  Of course, all the gawkers with their cellphone cameras and video cameras are funny in a way, because this is what every one of us would do in the same situation, so we too could say “I was there when it all went down”.   From that point this movie becomes a straight up monster movie.  The kids are doing everything they can to stay alive, Rob is trying to rescue Beth, and the toil involved with that is considerable.  The monster is freakin’ everywhere, who knew Manhattan was so small?  One thing I thought was odd was the lack of dead bodies… they just weren’t there, anywhere.  It’s like Manhattan was almost instantly de-peopled, which is one of the most unbelievable things to the movie.  Example:  no bodies down in the subway stations, no bodies in the apartment buildings as they rescued Beth, no bodies anywhere except in Triage.  More scenes from our collective recent history:  the scene near the end of the movie where the rest of the group get separated from Lilly as they board the rescue helicopters- so Hurricane Katrina, and (as has been noted previously) the dust and building collapse scenes are what we all saw over and over after 9/11.    The only part I really hated was when they were walking the subway tracks and they got attacked by the Crab Crickets – I HATE BUGS!!!  When they turned on the nightvision and all those things were hanging on the tunnel ceiling, I flashed back to my basement ceiling and the camel crickets.  I’m with you Cathy… hate ‘em hate ‘em hate ‘em!  Meanwhile, the monster is still running amok, and that’s a beauty of a monster, I’m telling you!  It’s got Godzilla beat all to heck, and it’s mean like only an out of place monster stuck in a large city with people shooting at it could be.  Nothing stops it, bringing home the lesson that no matter how powerful we think we are, we aren’t all that.  Something’s bigger, and some things cannot be beaten.  Thus the ending.  Hammer down was the only solution?  Hmmm… I’d like to think that my government wouldn’t lay waste to my city with that little consideration, but given all the things my government has done to it’s people in the last 8 years, I don’t know that anymore.  The Cloverfield Project ended with nuclear bombing, an explosion, a bunch of debris falling, and black screen… that’s all.  And that’s the end of this vignette of life.  That’ how it should have ended… with the questions about whether we are safe, whether this could ever happen, what else happened?  Life ends with questions and finality.  That’s really accurate though, since life is full of questions and a lot of them aren’t answered with death. 

Regardless of all this, it’s a good movie!  I liked it, a lot! I even liked the lack of a soundtrack, that surprise element that came from having no musical clues that “SOMETHING IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN!”  I recommend you see it, but understand the differences before you go.  There is no happy ending, but in the end, it’s a really good monster movie! 

TWO THUMBS UP!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 9:42 pm and is filed under In the news today, Pop Culture, it'll make you cool!.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.