Cloverfield doesn't stand up to the hype

To write about Cloverfield like anything –the movie, the aforementioned writing, the impact of either – matters is to ignore the skyscraper-sized alien-prune phallus in the room. The film is as impervious to criticism as it is to logic; it’s something like Godzilla for viral video, The Blair Witch Project with the anxieties of the post-9/11 world, yadda yadda yadda. Here’s what I know: if this movie makes ten million dollars for each of its roughly 75 minutes (and it probably will), it is because of a marketing campaign designed to create a vague suspicion that the film does anything remotely new and to delay the discovery that, in fact, it doesn’t.

Shot entirely through the viewpoint of a single camera and its amateur operator, the story begins at a going-away party for Rob (Michael Stahl-David), a rich, white thirty-something leaving town for a corporate job, and becomes a going-away party for most of New York, including the Statue of Liberty, a couple dozen office towers and apartment buildings, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Meanwhile, Rob, His Ex-Girlfriend, His Brother, His Brother’s Ex-Girlfriend, His Best Friend and The Girl His Best Friend Has A Crush On struggle to get out of New York alive or at least get really far with the whole thing on tape. The characters may not exactly live and breathe, but there’s a reason these things aren’t called “survivor movies.” They’re there, with enough naturalistic-sounding dialogue to prevent audiences from rooting for them to die horrible deaths, and that’s what counts. Cloverfield is as exciting as it needs to be, mainly because the tricks director Matt Reeves learned from Alien and Jaws still work. Claustrophobia, confusion, and casualties will be a winning ticket no matter how a monster movie is packaged, and when it’s a lean gut punch like this one, you might as well open it at the bank.

But, the film is not without its aspirations. There are obvious, conscious echoes of September 11^th: one scene early in the film has stunned onlookers wandering around lower Manhattan covered in dust, an uncomfortably familiar image. Does that make this a commentary on paranoia? A metaphor for the damage done to American civil liberties in the name of protecting them against terrorism? Nope, it’s a summer blockbuster that forgot to come out while the heat still drove the masses to any dark, cool room, and if it happened to be a room with a movie screen in a building in a shopping mall with dozens of movie screens in a theater that is part of a chain of thousands, projecting a film combining massive destruction, old-timey flag-waving, and anonymously attractive actors, well, pass the artificial butter bucket. Megaproducer J.J. Abrams needn’t worry, though, because as Michael Bay surely whispers in his sleep, “If you knock it down, they will come.”

--- Rob Turbovsky, Muse Film Editor