i finally managed to see cloverfield last night.
the film is basically godzilla meets "the blair witch project" (with echoes of "rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead"--see below). the entire plot is viewed from a shaky handheld video supposedly taken by one of the main characters. it's a little contrived that he would continue shooting film as new york gets destroyed. if a monster ever attacks philadelphia, i'm dropping the camera and getting the hell out of there.
but the interesting thing about "cloverfield"--the thing that made it worth seeing in my opinion--is the fact that the film centers on ordinary people caught up in the destruction rather than the types of people who would ordinarily be the heroes of a monster-rampaging-through-a-city film. presumably somewhere out there the president is agonizing over how to save the country's largest city, generals are arguing over the best way to kill the monster, a crack special forces team is on a hopeless mission to take down the creature, the nation's top scientists are trying desperately to figure out the its one critical weakness, et. cetera. but all that stuff happens off screen. we know that's going on out there, because that's what always goes on in these films. even people like me, who haven't seen very many godzilla-type movies at all, know that's how these things go. and there are bits of those other plots scattered throughout the film. the military shows up on the streets fairly soon. our heroes wander through a few battles, none of which we ever see from beginning to end. there's a very brief (about a second long) scene in which a body from one of the monster's offspring being wheeled past by a group of scientists (or at least people in white coats). you hear about that the military will institute "operation hammer down" unless the tide turns soon. at lot is going on that the main characters don't see, or just get hints of.
because our heroes never get the full picture of what is going on and they are just the people (literally) underfoot as the real battle rages above them, the film ends up being a lot more scary than it would otherwise be. a monster attack is not something that i'm really that afraid of. scenes of some CGI creature or a guy in a big rubber suit knocking down models of buildings is not that frightening to me. but i believe in chaos, in being buffeted around and threatened by things that are beyond my control. the falling buildings, people streaming over bridges in lower manhattan, and dazed survivors wandering the streets cannot help but evoke the memory of 9/11. and while the shaky handcam gets pretty old by halfway through the film, it increases the sense of disorientation and pandemonium.
"cloverfield" is far from a great film. i wouldn't even call it a really good film. some of the heroes are pretty annoying and most are suicidally stupid. but it's still more than the average monster film. perhaps it's the best that the rampaging monster genre has to offer.
(adding: if they make this sequel i predict that it will really really suck)
