Film Review: “Cloverfield” * * *
Face it — watching a guy in a zipped-up Godzilla costume knocking down cardboard boxes simply does not work anymore. Even the slick-but-stupid computer-generated version from a decade ago bored viewers to death with its lizard-brained script.
The solution delivered in the bracing, revisionist monster movie “Cloverfield” is to put viewers squarely in the path of a marauding beast and make it as realistic as home video of a child’s birthday party. Shot on what looks like commercial-grade digital video, “Cloverfield” is a first-person account of destruction for the YouTube age.
The central conceit of “Cloverfield” is that this is not a traditional narrative movie — it is a tape discovered in an area “formerly known as Central Park,” documenting the last hours in the lives of several Manhattanites as they watched their city being destroyed. It begins with a surprise party for Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David), who is moving to Japan the next day and recently had a falling out with his girlfriend, Beth (Odette Yustman).
Just as the party gets going, fireballs light up distant buildings in midtown, and reports of an earthquake soon give way to something otherworldly and unstoppable. In the video, shot by a dim partygoer named Hud (T.J. Miller), this creature is only seen in fleeting moments. Hud and friends Rob, Lily (Jessica Lucas) and Marlena (Lizzy Caplan) are too busy running away to focus on their predator.
This film will be compared endlessly to “The Blair Witch Project,” but its structure is far more similar to the 1988 cult movie “Miracle Mile,” in which a man finds out about an imminent nuclear attack and must run to reach his girlfriend before the bomb hits. In “Cloverfield,” Rob is trying to reach Beth before the monster does, and the video chronicles the friends’ catastrophic journey to her apartment near Central Park.
The setup for “Cloverfield” lets viewers know that things will not go well for these travelers: The tape was found, after all, so something terrible probably happened to the cameraman. These aren’t the most scintillating characters found on this tape, but their fairly mundane problems and response to crisis would be less believable if they were clever — this is supposed to be an everyman account of the world ending.
And here’s fair warning: Viewers expecting to learn everything about this creature — where it came from, what it’s named, who’s its daddy — will go away disappointed and possibly angry at director Matt Reeves and producer J.J. Abrams for inflicting an unfinished, wrapped-up story on an unsuspecting public.
But in many real-life attacks, the motivations aren’t always clear. Like “Blair Witch,” “Cloverfield” will not stand up to repeated viewings, but for 84 minutes, it’s monstrous.
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