Shared Darkness

An exercise in guerrilla-style genre
filmmaking that reframes a classic monster movie conceit as a post-September 11
allegory of big city trepidation, new Internet sensation Cloverfield emerges from the cocoon of its pre-release hype as thrilling
piece of terror tailor-made for our times. Skillfully evoking more dread than
lasting cathartic release, the sensibly-budgeted film should make its mark as
the first hit of 2008, connecting strongly with the 18-34-year-old demographic
and other genre fans looking for comfortably familiar stories with exciting new
trappings.

Like 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, which took advantage of nascent Internet
marketing to whip audience interest into a fervor, Cloverfield is an exercise in “found footage” subjectivity, unfolding
completely in handheld style, with often canted or shaky camerawork. Crucial to
whether Cloverfield commercially connects
anything at all like that film, which rang up $140 million domestically and
another $110 million internationally, is the question of whether mainstream audiences
unfamiliar with its pre-release branding buy tickets.

At the very least Cloverfield should easily outpace Snakes on a Plane — the last big pre-release, viral marketing sensation,
which ended up pulling in a disappointing $60 million worldwide. But while PG-13
films like 2005’s White Noise ($90
million worldwide), Boogeyman ($67
million internationally) and Hide and
Seek ($122 million worldwide) have proven there’s a January market for
supernatural-tinged thrillers, courting the portion of that core audience that
may be resistant to outright monster flicks will determine its final box office
tally. To its advantage, Cloverfield
arrives with a much bigger buzz, thanks to the participation of producer and Lost hit-maker J.J. Abrams, as well as
its unique style and framing device. These elements, plus its superb execution,
give the movie top-shelf ancillary value that will ensure both profitability and
potential spin-offs for other platforms and outlets.

Like The
Blair Witch Project, the film chronicles the plight of a group of young
people fighting for their lives trapped in an unforgiving outdoors, in this
case an urban jungle under siege by a gargantuan rampaging monster, and
hundreds of hostile smaller, scurrying creatures which pose every bit as much
of a threat. The film opens chillingly, with a silent
title card that stamps the subsequent video camera footage as a found audiovisual
document, from the U.S. military. The first portion of the tape reveals the tender morning
after a hook-up between long-time friends Rob (Michael David-Stahl) and Beth
(Odette Yustman). The videotape, and thus the movie, then leaps forward a
month, to the evening of a huge going-away party for Rob, who’s preparing to
move to Japan as part of a big promotion.

Tasked by his girlfriend Lily (Jessica
Lucas) with recording the event, Rob’s brother, Jason (Mike Vogel), passes off
the duty to friend Hud (T.J. Miller), who fruitlessly tries to engage Marlena
(Lizzy Caplan) in flirtatious small talk. The party takes a turn for the
awkward when Beth shows up with another guy. Rob’s suppressed feelings of affection
come bubbling to the surface, words are spoken in anger, and Beth leaves.

Suddenly, a massive jolt shakes the remaining
revelers, and the power goes out. As the group heads outside to see what
exactly has happened, fireballs explode on the horizon, and utter havoc is unleashed.
After one route of evacuation is sealed, Rob receives a distraught cell phone
message from Beth, and becomes determined to make his way to her apartment to
try to find her. Friends in tow, the group sets out, but when the destruction
and fighting on the streets between the creature and the National Guard gets
too intense, they seek shelter underground, and try to traverse subterranean subway
tracks.

Nicely balancing confusion and
interpersonal anxiety with these grander, under-siege segments, Drew Goddard’s
screenplay is a thing a pared down grace and lean, muscular virtuosity. It
starts by sketching out the underpinnings of character in fine fashion. After
18 brisk, well-plotted minutes of typically angsty young adult introduction, the
movie yields to mayhem — basically an hour-long dash through urban hell.

As with other apocalyptic and sci-fi
movies, Cloverfield squeezes some
bedazzlement out of the destruction of familiar, iconic buildings and
monuments. Here it’s the Brooklyn Bridge, in a grim obliteration that serves as the film’s first mass-scale,
panicky set piece. There’s also the beheaded Statue of Liberty, which arrives
early in the movie, and additionally serves as the perfect visual metaphor for America’s
still-lingering apprehension over the state of world events and its own
security. Yet director Matt Reeves (a co-creator of
TV’s Felicity, whose other feature
credit is 1996’s The Pallbearer) also
proves himself effective at simplistic evocative imagery, as with a coachman-less
horse-drawn carriage wandering through Central
Park.

Key to substantial gratification with Cloverfield are two bits of necessary surrender:
succumbing to its overall framing device, and accepting the notion that such
trauma unfolds against a PG-13 backdrop, which is only really a matter of
language, coming after movies like Superbad
and the Hostel films have made coarse exclamatory talk integral to their stamp of “realism” within their respective
genres. The action sequences here — including a bravura night-vision attack in the
subway tunnel — are so tensely effective as to eradicate any legitimate
quibbles with the rating for the rest of movie, a problem that arguably plagued Live Free or Die Hard last summer, at least in advance of its release.

Cineastes holding on steadfastly to the notion
that less is more may balk at the degree to which the film reveals its monster.
While it’s true that this does, if not undercut, at least muddy the water with
respect to the movie’s metaphorical associations, it’s interestingly handled
within the framework of the film, and seems a commercial tip of the cap as much
as anything. It’s undeniable that Cloverfield
is, at its core, a metaphor for the terror and uncertainty of the real world,
from its aforementioned iconic poster image and willfully vague tagline (“Some
thing has found us”), which makes no mention of a CGI monster on which millions
of dollars was spent, to specific dialogue of choking despondency (“I don’t
know why this is happening”). It’s incidentally a monster thriller. Like much
good cinema, Cloverfield works on multiple levels.
For the full, slightly longer original review, from Screen International, click here.