Cloverfield (2008)
Paramount DVD (region 1, 2, 4)
d. Matt Reeves; pr. JJ Abrams, Brian Burke; scr. Drew Goddard; ph. Michael Bonvillain; ed. Kevin Stitt; cast. TJ Miller, Jessica Lucas, Lizzy Caplan, Michael Stahl-David, Mike Vogel, Odette Yustman (85 mins)
Cloverfield is Godzilla re-imagined for the War on Terror.
The iconography is of a barely-glimpsed monster destroying a New York City lined with wrecked skyscrapers and the visual style is entirely hand held. Digital video home-movie style aesthetics – a combination of eyewitness footage of “ground zero” during the hours after the collapse of the twin towers, reality television and the immediacy of The Blair Witch Project, the film to which Cloverfield will inevitably be compared. It is abstracted from any context of terrorism so as to play as escapist fantasy on the post 9-11 fear of New York in ruins, not by a monstrous Al Qaeda but by a monster possibly from outer space. As that it is both effective and enjoyable, directed and shot with tremendous creativity and zest.
It takes some time to get to the main thrust of the attack on New York as glimpsed in previews released in advance of the movie, cleverly without naming its title to generate much pre-release interest when combined with a captivating poster image of the Statue of Liberty’s head ripped off.
It may be superficial, but it works as entertainment: 9-11 re-invented as populist fantasy. The long prologue serves its purpose in that regard – people living life blissfully unaware of the destruction that is to come from outside. Hence, the last line of dialogue seconds before the monster makes its presence first felt is “you got to learn to say forget the world, and hang on to the people you care about most”. The timing and situation that follows is that of the disaster movies of the 1970s, in such films as The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure, wherein a select group of survivors of a natural disaster bond but are systematically decimated as they struggle to escape a hostile environment.
This post 9-11 reclamation of the disaster movie follows from a similar transposition in the first two films made about 9-11, World Trade Center and United 93.
United 93 took the theme of crisis management from the Airport series of the 1970s just as World Trade Center drew on the search fro trapped survivors iconography of Earthquake. The films made during the Bush War on Terror that dealt with 9-11 drew heavily on this disaster movie genre, and it is this heritage and association one also finds in Cloverfield’s twenty-something post 9-11 disaster fantasy. It’s this lineage that makes Cloverfield more interesting than its allusion to Godzilla and radiation horror end of the earth fantasies, which is its other generic trope.
Hence, before the monster begins to be glimpsed through the buildings, its presence is preceded with explosive fire which effectively constitutes a New York under attack by an unknown enemy: the fear of New Yorkers at 9-11 told with the captivating immediacy of digital moviemaking possible seven years later. Because of this deliberate construction, Cloverfield updates the monster movie to a uniquely 9-11 level of allusion, in design and menace resembling HR Giger’s Alien work. Character revelation is secondary to exposition as it proceeds through involving set-pieces and with a short running time, brisk pace and oddly downbeat conclusion, Cloverfield is consistently engaging.
