January 19, 2008
Movies Department
Cloverfield - Review
[No spoilers that you wouldn't get from watching the trailers.]
When your body moves, your brain coordinates the images from your eyes with balance information from your inner ear to give you a consistent picture of the world. This works fine in the natural world, but our modern world presents your brain with situations it's not ready for. On an airplane, your eyes see a perfectly still cabin, but your inner ear can feel the plane pitching and rolling in turbulent air. You experience these conflicting inputs as dizzyness.
If the inputs are severe enough and persistent enough, some low-level function in your brain reaches an unfortunate conclusion. In the natural world, the most likely cause of dizziness is poison, probably from something you ate. The obvious solution is to empty your stomach as quickly as possible. This is why you get airsick.
The same thing can happen in reverse. If you're sitting still on a firm object---say, a seat in a movie theater---but the picture on the screen is moving and jerking around a lot, your brain might conclude that you need to vomit.
Which brings me to the New York monster movie Cloverfield. Like The Blair Witch Project, the whole movie is shot with a handheld camera. However, the characters shooting Blair Witch were supposed to have filmmaking skills. This movie appears to be shot on home video by an amateur named Hud who is documenting his friend Rob's going-away party.
I knew that going in, but I expected that after a few shaky minutes to establish the premise, the film would start to cheat and steady the camera a bit. That never happened. After an hour and a half of what Roger Ebert is calling "Queasy-Cam," I felt a little ill. Would it have ruined the story if Hud had been Rob's professional videographer friend?
Obviously, I had a lot of trouble getting past the camera work. I think the filmmakers wanted to put us in the action and make it real. Instead, the shaky camera work kept breaking me out of the story. It left me detached from the characters.
As others have pointed out, the movie's visual style intentionally evokes a lot of news footage of disasters, especially the events of 9/11. I don't really think it's exploitive. It's just that we've all learned what a major disaster looks like, so that's what our disaster movies have to look like.
In many ways, this movie reminded me of the problem I had with Spielberg's remake of War of the Worlds. Both movies follow the personal struggle of a small group of characters faced with a threat far beyond their ability to handle. So we spend the whole movie watching them run away, while in the background the U.S. Army tries to do something about the problem.
I suppose this is realistic. People caught up in disasters have no sense of the big picture. For most people in the World Trade Center on 9/11, their whole day was about a loud crash followed by an hour of walking down the stairs and away from the building. Terrifying for them, but you wouldn't want to see a movie about it.
That's the biggest problem with Cloverfield. The main conflict is this incredible battle between the monster and military. Someone somewhere is commanding the increasingly desperate attacks against the creature while simultaneously coordinating the evacuation of the city.
Meanwhile, we're stuck watching a very long subplot.
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