Like 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, which partially sold itself as a rescued artifact and ingeniously took advantage of nascent Internet marketing to whip audience interest into a fervor, Cloverfield is a guerrilla-style exercise in “found footage” subjectivity, unfolding completely in handheld style, with often canted or shaky camerawork. Reframing a classic monster movie conceit as a post-September 11 allegory of big city trepidation, and skillfully evoking more dread than lasting cathartic release, it's also a thrilling, skewed slice of cinematic terror tailor-made for our times.

Like the aforementioned film Cloverfield 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 project owes its existence to the participation of producer and Lost hit-maker J.J. Abrams, who's quietly setting up his own brand-name film factory, albeit in more diverse fashion than comedy man-of-the-moment Judd Apatow. Yet the style, unique framing device and top-shelf execution are what ultimately help sell this mash-up of classic genre filmmaking and new-school tropes.



Cloverfield 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, above left) 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 promotion.

Tasked by his girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas, above right) 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, above middle) 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 — which include a bravura night-vision attack in the subway tunnel, as well as a ferocious street battle with real military sniper fire that Hillary Clinton would surely remember — 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 then 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, something that DVD interviews about its late production inclusion seem to support. 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 and DVD cover 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”). Like much great cinema, Cloverfield works on multiple levels; it’s incidentally a monster thriller.

Presented in 1.78:1 widescreen (1080p/VC-1), the picture in the film's Blu-ray release is even crisper and clearer than on its standard DVD release, particularly as it relates to small object detail. Audio is anchored by a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix, with optional English, French and Spanish subtitles as well. Even though the entire film is supposed to be comprised of amateur footage, it's not wanting for clarity — especially in the sound mix, which effectively uses rumbling deep registers to convey the impending and above-ground terror in the disrupted party scene and subway track sequence, respectively.

A nice collection of supplemental features, all presented in high-definition, are almost all subtitle-enabled too, which is a nice touch. Director Reeves sits for an audio commentary track, and it's a thoughtful and substantive affair throughout. Even better, however, may be a superb 28-minute making-of featurette which intersperses interview segments with Abrams, Reeves, producer Bryan Burk and other behind-the-scenes figures with loads of on-set production footage from the movie's semi-secret summer 2007 shoot. A good bit of material here features Miller, since he's the lens through which so much of the movie unfolds (costar Margot Farley good-naturedly chides him that he can "screw up everything twice, as an actor and a cameraman!"), but Caplan also flashes her droll wit, and we learn that some of the actors stay out of breath by jumping rope between takes. Reeves and editor Kevin Stitt, meanwhile, talk about the "soda straw" approach of the movie's visual scope — that is, creating a grand vision captured in very restricted form. After 28 days of principal photography in and around Los Angeles, the production moves to New York City with a skeleton crew; there, even under the codename "Cheese," they amusingly discover pictures of their shoot posted to the Internet within mere hours.

A separate 22-minute special effects featurette duplicates a bit of footage, but does showcase plenty of impressive green-screen work, from the Brooklyn Bridge sewquence and other street scenes. Another six-minute featurette focuses more on the creature design itself, with conceptual artist Neville Page talking about his work, the skin of the creature and its pupil-less eyes, which are modeled after those of a great white shark, nature's most efficient killing machine. Blooper fun gets highlighted in a four-minute segment called "Clover Fun," and there are also four brief deleted scenes and two alternate endings, all with optional commentary from Reeves. Most of the former are judicious tonal trims (a wisecrack from Hud during the ultra-tense subway sequence, for instance), but I did wish a post-attack sequence between Marlena and Lizzy — part of a brief re-shoot, in which she acknowledges the trauma caused by Jason's death — had been left in. The two alternate endings, meanwhile, are very much variations on a theme; without spoiling the specifics of the conclusion, one is essentially a different coda, built around a shot for which Reeves had great affinity, while the other focuses on a very brief interstitial flash which hints at the source camera actually capturing the film's footage being found.

The new addition to the Blu-ray edition of the film is a viewing option called "Special Investigation Mode" which establishes further spatial clarity, letting audiences track the locations of the characters, the creature and the military via a box in the upper corner of the screen. On the bottom, meanwhile, there's an in-story, textual fact track, similar to something like the factoid track featured on the DVD release of First Sunday. For fans of the movie's viral marketing campaign craving even more context and detail, this is an especially nice bonus.

Finally, there's also a special Easter egg on the disc, able to be found by toggling right after lingering above the Spanish subtitles option on the set-up scene. Doing so will yield a two-minute clip of cast and crew members riffing in goofball fashion on one of the military figures' lines of dialogue in the movie — "Rack 'em and pack 'em, we're phantoms in 15!" Cloverfield, meanwhile, seems to be rightly enjoying a bit more than a mere 15 minutes in the pop-cultural spotlight; talks of a sequel or prequel persist, though Reeves and Abrams insist they have yet to come up with an angle that fully satisfies them. To purchase the film on Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) A (Disc)

        

 

What did you think of this article?

Liked
Disliked
No Opinion