Monday, January 21, 2008
Don't watch CLOVERFIELD, give me the ticket money instead.
Another end-of-world movie I thought, and such movies should be nice and meaningful to watch. Well, it's one of the best movies I've ever watch. My eyes was fixed on that show and didn't dared blinked for a second. The actors were great, the graphics were the best. The best camera angle ever and for $8, it's really worth the money. I'm willing to pay double the price to watch it again.
NOT!!
Just reversed what I mentioned above. You won't want to watch this piece of s**t. Why did I even pay money to get dizzy and cursing at the movie all the time.
The film begins like The Blair Witch Project with an explanation that what we are about to see is found footage of some terrifying event. The titles imply that Cloverfield is some government code name for the site of the destruction we were about to witness. A tape begins to play. The date burned onto the image tells us it’s April 27. Rob (Michael Stahl Stahl-David) is videotaping the morning after with his new girlfriend. After a few cute shots, the tape jumps to May 22. Now it’s Rob’s going away party. He’s leaving for Japan. (This made me hopeful, the reference to Japan meant that maybe the film would pay appropriate homage to the great monster movies from the land of the rising sun.) Rob’s friend Hud (T.J. Miller) has been tasked with videotaping reactions and good-byes from everyone. Hud takes his job seriously, and it’s a good thing because he’s the one who is about to diligently document the terror to come.
When something like an earthquake hits Manhattan, Hud runs out to film the chaos, including the now famous Statue of Liberty headshot. Something is tearing up the city but no one can figure out what. All Hud catches on camera is a glimpse of something big moving through the city. And how far into the movie are we? Some twenty minutes and still no sense of what the creature is. All we know is it’s big and destructive. It will take quite some time before we get a good glimpse of the creature.
So, the monster did not appear in the first ten minutes, and yes, ultimately, Cloverfield sucked. When it ended, a bare 80 minutes after it began, you could hear a collective sigh of disappointment from the audience. Many of us even waited until the last end credit rolled by in hopes of some post credit kicker that would redeem the mess. But no. All we got was some heavy breathing, possibly implying that not everyone was as dead as we thought.
Not only did it take half the film before we got to see the creature but the many minutes leading up to the reveal were painful. The shaky-cam was not only annoying but it called so much attention to the contrivance of the device that it pulled us out of the story. Handheld camerawork can be effective — in small doses and when used for effect. Paul Greengrass made excellent use of the “shaky-cam” in Bloody Sunday and to lesser effect in United 93. he used it to give a sense of immediacy. But as used in Cloverfield, the handheld camera conveys less a sense of immediacy and more a sense of this being a realty TV take on the monster genre. That means it feels like no one is writing and no one is in control of the material. It’s just being thrown out there “uncut.” And oh boy does this film need some editing and the sense that someone is in control. Just because it’s meant to look like home video doesn’t mean it has to look like crap! Some people, even drunk ones, can actually hold the camera still and get someone within the frame. Plus we don’t buy that Hud would shoot as he’s trying to climb from one sky scraper to another or as the girl he’s been hot for is attacked and in need of help. At least The Blair Witch Project was a genuine low budget movie and its rinky-dink look was justified. But Cloverfield had money and could have made the film look better. The only redeeming factor here is that Hud sometimes provides amusing running commentary. It’s like having Harold and Kumar or Seth Rogen dropping into a horror film to provide comic relief to the proceedings.
For Cloverfield, this creative team spends way too much time setting up characters that we don’t really care about, and far too little time with the creature and its destruction. Personally, I liked the creature far more than the humans. The monster looked very cool and it seemed able to spawn little winged creatures (bat-like tarantulas with lethal bites) that provided the film with one truly scary attack in the subway. But we are given no information about what the creature is, where it might be from, or any speculation at all about it. Abrams has said that he wanted to create an American monster movie that would provide a legendary figure like Godzilla and be a metaphor for our times. Well his nameless beast does neither. Godzilla had personality! You can make fun of the fact that he was a man in a rubber suit, but that man in the rubber suit gave Godzilla a personality, just like King Kong had a personality. A monster without some kind of identity will never become legendary. As for the notion of a metaphor – what, America is destroying itself? A metaphor for 9/11? Okay, maybe that works, but not very well. This film seems so designed for an audience that’s plugged into the web, electronics and itself that there’s no humanity in sight. Those who liked the film were probably texting their friends while the movie was still going on. But for me, Cloverfield has about as much human interest and suspense as an episode of survivor.
After seeing Cloverfield, I was so frustrated and disappointed that I felt like I needed a palate cleanser.
