Sunday, January 20, 2008

Cloverfield: Godzilla at Ground-Zero

Watching Cloverfield, I couldn't help but wonder why no one had thought of this idea earlier. How often had we seen movies like Godzilla and Transformers, were the giagantic battle in the metropolis without paying any attention to those down below? Cloverfield provides that experience through a character's hand-held camcorder, while something that took alittle extra effort to be like Godzilla while avoiding copyright infrigment.


Long story short, we follow Rob and his friends as they record his going away party, which gets interrupted twice. The party is first interrupted by a lovers' argument between Rob and the beautiful Beth, ending with her leaving the party. The second interruption is a Godzilla-sized monster decapitating the Statue of Liberty and throwing the head onto Rob's front-doorstep. The rest of the movie follows Rob's attempt to rescue Beth from the remains of her apartment.

You'll notice something about how I just described the movie. It follows Rob and his friends, not the monster. The monster is just the element of horror for us to watch the characters interact and change around. The movie itself is an attempt to, mostly successful, personalize the immediate moments in the characters lives. A scene emphasizing this is when Rob recieves a call from a recently-desceased friend's mother and has to tell her what happened. Although the scene doesn't recieve much depth, it has much more emotion than is usually presented in a horror movie.

The movie also excells in not throwing the same punch twice. It does this by giving us the monster part by part. We see it Lady Liberty's head land, then a tentacle here, and finally the size of it. The size is topped off by seeing how it can stand up to the US military, or more appropriately, how it can take anything thrown at it. If you're not watching how the monster become more horrificly intimating, you're watching its victims face another challenge to their physical and emotional limits. In a motion of creativity, they wrote in smaller monsters falling off of the larger monster, allowing them to bite people hiding in the hard-to-reach places.

It is unique because of the hand-held manner it is filmed. At first, it seems to be going out of its way to appear natural, then it is part roller-coast (in a semi-nausiating way) and part artistic. The movie is natural in how it is a video of an attack recording over and on top of a video of Rob and Beht's last date (how practical a way to add in flashbacks). Ultimately the hand-held is abused. No movie should have to rely on being nausia to get its point across. They did make it plausible that someone would carry the camera so long by assigning the camera duties to the goof-ball of the group, who seems to have nothing better to do than to document everything. The goof-ball has a very memorable line of being human when he states, honestly, "we have the choice of dying in here, dying in the tunnel, or dying in the streets."

Entertaining? Definitely. Despite the flaws in logic of the monster and characters, the movie works as both horror and roller coaster. I advise you sit up front in a theater with high-definition, somewhere near the front. This is one time the view and sudden bursts are worth it because it is not just something jumping at you, but often the building shaking, something blowing up, or a number of the monsters. There is a scene where the monster creeps up on both you and the characters. I've only seen such a subtle jump work so well in Alien, The Descent, and here.

Marketable? Currently number one at the box office office speaks for some of itself. The rest is spoken for when with the rarity of getting good horror of this level. The thrill-ride anyone can appreciate, but the variety of tactics to make us jump and the personal level of the characters will make even more appreciate it.

Memorable? Camera was used in Blair Witch. Monster is the lesser-known cousin of Kong and Godzilla. I'm left to ask what is different in this movie other than its delivery? Nothing really.

My suggestions: Sit near the front. Enjoy the jumps. Don't watch if you get motion-sickness.

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