( 1 votes, average: 4 / 5 )
Loading ...One of the reasons for my Neocratic absence has been my mini-career in film criticism. I will occasionally post some of my pieces, in the sag times between substantial posts.
JJ Abrams can do no wrong. Fresh from the success of his TV creations Lost and Alias and en route to directing the new Star Trek film, he has in Cloverfield produced the best doomsday movie of recent years.
Shot by the central characters themselves on handicam as if a home movie, Cloverfield (the deliberately incongruous title comes from the codename for the military response operation depicted) takes us to the front line of a battle between present day New York and some Godzilla-like creature tearing the city apart. And it is so present day: the visuals reference 9/11, Big Brother, YouTube, the battle for Fallujah, the looting of New Orleans and much more, with the effect of locating the story firmly in our own realities and in so doing making the implausible distinctly real.
Which is no mean feat – how easy can it be to bring believability to the story of a goodbye party for a friend bound for foreign shores which mutates into a goodbye to life as we know it? Very, if your instinct for the zeitgeist is as sharp as Abrams’.
Played out in near-realtime, the audience expects no more an understanding of unfolding events than one would have by peering through the city’s skyscrapers and seeing some thing tear through the man-made canyons. Thus no need for quasi-scientific explanations of how it got there and who we need to blame and in their place we have visceral first-hand impact and fear. The suspension of disbelief is made entirely willing by the hand-held style: we do not expect special effects trickery in our home movies and when we see it here, we want to believe.
And that is the film’s triumph. Does it speak to us about the American psyche and the mutating insurgency in Iraq? Maybe, but who cares. It simply – and enjoyably - scares the hell out of you.
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This is a great review but if focuses too much on zeitgeist and not enough on the amazing, innovative, ingenious craftsmanship that made Cloverfield so good. The brilliance of their innovation is that they breath new life into the natural forces of storytelling drama innate and inherent in any good yarn. This was Aristotle, right; you can’t neglect the rules of drama. But you can reinvent them constantly, as did Abrams.