Cloverfield

As I’ve admitted before, I’m a big J.J. Abrams fan. I didn’t watch Alias, mainly because Jennifer Garner kind of annoys me, but I’ve seen all the episodes of Lost, totally dug Mission Impossible III, and can’t wait to see the reinvention of the Star Trek franchise. Sure, Lost has been uneven. Now that I’m most of the way through the clipped season 4, I’d put it as only slightly better than season 2, far inferior to season 3.

Abrams didn’t write or direct Cloverfield, but he produced it. Fair or not, I was going to judge the quality of this movie based on his name alone, regardless of who actually directed the film or wrote the screenplay. And my assessment?

Gold baby. Pure gold.

Let me get this out of the way first. Those reports you heard of people getting motion sickness watching the movie in the theater? Believe them. Fear them.

I didn’t get sick watching the movie, but I did have a pounding headache by the end. The movie is completely narrated through the perspective of a hand-held video camera. And the person doing much of the filming isn’t exactly Glenn Ford or Robert Redford. And his camera isn’t exactly mounted on one of those cool rail-cars that rides on a track. Instead, Hud jostles the camera like he’s on a rollercoaster; he can be forgiven poor cinematography because he spends a good chunk of the movie running for his life from the monster that ate New York. The camera is rarely still, and the few times it is, the angle is strange like when Hud lowers the camera so that he, Jason, and Lily can gossip about Beth and Robert.

But despite any physical discomfort the camera perspective may cause its audience, it’s for a just cause. Filmed conventionally, the movie could have come off as comic, or worse yet, banal. Instead, the video camera perspective lends a gritty realism to a movie that is essentially the United States’ version of Godzilla. Abrams said as much in interviews. He said he was inspired to make Cloverfield because unlike Japan, the U.S. didn’t have a legacy of a quintessential monster attacking its major cities.

It does now.

My favorite part of this movie? The fact that fighting the monster occurred around the main story narrative of Robert and his friends trying to rescue Beth in the midst of the monster attack. I loved those quick, furtive glimpses of the military throwing everything they had at the monster. My most favorite, favorite part was when Hud’s chopper lifts up and the camera pans a shot out the window catching a stealth bomber unloading a devastating payload directly upon the rampaging hulk. Amid a plume of fire and smoke, Hud whoops it up certain the monster has been destroyed. Suddenly, the thing leaps from the inferno unscathed and whacks the helicopter from the sky. I knew the moment Hud started celebrating that the monster wasn’t dead, but the movie still managed to surprise me with that smoky jump.

My only quibble with the movie is Robert’s linear motivation to rescue Beth. Everything the characters did and said in that movie felt real. Except for Robert insisting on walking into the path of the monster to rescue a girlfriend he couldn’t be certain was alive. Plopped in the middle of such a strongly written script, I immediately thought how unlikely it would be for anyone to react that way, even for unrequited love. I think the movie could have been even better if some other contingency, one unplanned by the main characters, put them in the path of the monster.

Like I said though, I’m nit picking. The movie is a triumph. I can’t wait to see what Abrams does with Star Trek.