Cloverfield (2008) Review

Cloverfield (2008) Review

With the new mysterious J.J Abram’s-produced 10 Cloverfield Lane coming out this week, I figured it was time to re-visit another mysterious Abram’s-produced movie with Cloverfield in the title, namely, Cloverfield! Since this movie came out just over eight years ago, expect spoilers throughout this review. 

I can’t remember when I first heard about Cloverfield coming out, precisely, but I remember anticipating it greatly thanks to the viral marketing campaign. It was like The Blair Witch Project, except it wasn’t marketed as “this is true footage” as much as it was just teased, very vaguely, but enough that it piqued many people’s interest. As a long-time fan of giant monster movies, I was sold on it just by knowing the very basic premise: a giant monster attacks New York City. 

J.J. Abrams said he wanted to create a giant monster for U.S. audiences that was the equivalent to Japan’s own Godzilla (I’m paraphrasing, of course, but that’s basically what he was getting at). Of course, that just made me even more excited. The trailers didn’t give anything away, and neither did the posters (the now-famous image of the mutilated statue of Liberty and the smoke rising from Manhattan in the background), but it was just enough to have me and my good friend excited enough to go see it opening night.

We got to the theater about 10 minutes before it was going to start. Somehow, some way, we got in line, got tickets, and got two fairly decent seats before the movie started. To this day, the opening night of Cloverfield is one of the busiest movie screenings I’ve ever attended. It was so full, people actually sat in the aisles on the stairs in groups (I’m not sure if people just chose to sit together on the stairs and there were actually many scattered free seats or if it was over 100 % full, but either way, it was packed). 

The monster that isn't the Cloverfield monster. Not sure what is is.

I left the theater feeling I little disappointed. Earlier that day, I had seen an alleged “leaked” picture of the Cloverfield monster (which has since been dubbed by fans as simply “Clover”), and I thought it looked pretty awesome and unique, but as I later discovered, the monster in the movie was completely different from the pic I’d seen. It’s not a bad design, but Clover definitely didn’t have the gravitas of Godzilla. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized, all the build up to the movie was better than the actual movie.

I’ve re-watched Cloverfield several times since seeing it in theaters, and I seem to dislike it more every time I see it. A Godzilla or King Kong this is not. Taking all of the marketing and anticipation out of the equation, and evaluating just the movie, I take issue with several aspects of it, though I do still appreciate some parts of the film.

Let me begin with the most obvious and possibly most-decisive element of Cloverfield: the fact that it’s found footage. Generally speaking, I’m not big on found footage, but having said that, there are a few movies that were innovative in their use of it (The Blair Witch Project, Chronicle), and I initially loved the idea of a giant monster movie being filmed like it was a real event. I understand the criticisms that found footage can be too shaky and nauseating and hard to look at, and for me, Cloverfield is an example of this. It is, at times, so shaky, it’s virtually impossible to tell what is on screen, but most of it is shot comprehensively enough that I didn’t have a constant problem. 

I did a review for the found-footage horror movie The Bay (link below) and mentioned that movie sometimes looked too perfectly imperfect. What I meant by that was the footage was clearly doctored to appear damaged or distorted in some way to appear more realistic, but it came off as looking purposeful. I have to give props to Cloverfield for at least coming across as feeling real. The footage is shaky, yes, but it does add another element of realism. They just went too overboard with it at times.

The characters react in a very realistic way to the events that transpire, however, I never really sympathized with them. It starts out with friends at a party saying goodbye to their friend Rob who’s moving to Japan (Godzilla reference? I think so.) and Hud is given a camera and told to record everyone’s personalized goodbyes to him, but Hud’s more interested in hooking up with Marlena. The whole party scene goes on for what feels like quite a while, and none of the characters are particularly interesting. Hud is supposed to be the comedic relief, and while he does offer some pretty funny lines in the later trek through the Subway, he is, overall, not very funny. 

After the monster attacks, the story is simply the group of friends trying to rescue Rob’s girlfriend Beth, who is trapped in her destroyed apartment. Beth is never really set up that much and we don’t get too much insight into her character, so the whole mission to get her feels somewhat inconsequential. The rest of the movie is just a series of scenes where one character dies in a traumatic event, the group escapes, and they continue. 

Hud’s continued pursuit of hooking up with Marlena is put to an end when Marlena is killed, and then Hud himself is killed, and we’re left at the end with boring Rob and boring Beth (who, by the way, should’ve totally been dead because she had some serious injuries and blood loss) trapped under a bridge, and they die? I guess? I mean they found the camera and retrieved the footage, but it looks like the bridge gets completely destroyed, so I’m guessing they died. Whatever. 

Human characters are not why people go to see giant monster movies, despite Hollywood continuing to try and prove otherwise. As I said before, Clover didn’t look anything like I had been led to believe it would, and its role in the movie is so small, it’s barely a cameo. People complained hard core about not seeing enough Godzilla in 2014’s Godzilla. Someone went and cut together all the footage of just him and the video is about 8 minutes long. Someone go cut together all the Clover footage. I’ll be surprised if the video’s more than one minute.

In a movie like Alien, hiding the monster worked effectively to make it scarier. In Cloverfield, it doesn’t make the monster scarier, it makes it more frustrating for the audience, especially when the human characters aren’t particularly engaging. Every glimpse of Clover (with maybe the exception of the second to last scene of the movie) is just a tease. There’s no real money shot, and you can use the excuse that it’s found footage and it would be “unrealistic” to have a shot like that, but it’s unsatisfactory just the same. 

The thing I hated about the monster the most were the parasitic creatures that dropped off its body. The concept is cool and makes some sense, but it instantly reminds me of the baby Godzilla’s in 1998’s Godzilla. Having a giant monster is enough, there isn’t a need to add smaller, human-sized monsters for the humans to interact with while the giant monster is off doing its thing. The little creatures looked frightening, they made creepy noises, and they were but a small part of the movie, but it still just felt like middle-of-the-movie filler to excuse the lack of giant monster.

I never expected Cloverfield to be some mind-blowing movie-going experience, but it could have been a much more entertaining experience had it taken a slightly different direction. The later parts of the movie are definitely more entertaining than the earlier parts, but the found footage style doesn’t compliment the overall story. It’s very straight-forward and definitely lacks the re-watch-ability factor of something like Pacific Rim or Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake, but having said that, I still think giant monster movie fans should give it a watch. It’s has pretty good visual effects (especially considering it is found footage), a couple decent action scenes, and is short, clocking in at a mere 85 minutes.

The Bay Review: http://cccmovies.blogspot.ca/2015/10/week-5-something-smells-fishy-normal-0_29.html