Cloverfield

[KLAXXON]

“Approximately seven hours ago, some thing attacked the city. If you’ve found this, if your watching this then you know more about it than I do”

After months of speculation (six to be exact) Pandora’s box was finally opened and Cloverfield was unveiled to the world. Like nothing before it, the latest project from producer J.J. Abrams came to us shrouded in mystery, making it one of the most exciting and unique titles of the year.

Envision if you will, being sat in a movie theatre. Popcorn on the knees, bag of sweets on the floor or whatever, and during the pleasurable interlude before your feature presentation begins you are shown a small teaser trailer. No title is given and it looks like its been shot entirely with a hand held camcorder. Might not seem like much… but boy-o-boy did this tiger start some chat.

Much like the early days of the hit T.V. show Lost (Abram’s being one of the creators of that show) a wave of speculation hit the Internet. Nothing but a wink and a tapped nose was given from the producers though… they were intent on keeping the details of this project on lockdown. Even the casting process was carried out in secret, with no script being sent out to candidates.

So what were they really holding back on? Well first of all, this movie totally lives up to the super high expectations that it had set for itself. The intense story follows the happenings of four friends after a shock attack from an unidentified entity on the city of New York - ala a decapitated statue of liberty.

Robert and his friends leave the apartment they are in and try to make it across the city as he desperately wants to see if his girlfriend Beth is still alive. To give away more plot details than this would be cruel so all I’ll say is that the trip across town isn’t gonna be the easiest one he’s ever made.

Feature length “Blair Witch” style camera shaking aside, this is one of the most original movies I’ve seen in years. The adulation of seeing a multi million-dollar special effect through a battery operated ‘Argos’ style camera is unexpectedly exhilarating. Never have we felt closer to the action and for the better part of ninety minutes you are right there with them.

Speculation about it being a second Godzilla movie or a Lost tie-in have now been put to bed. This is a fresh new mind-blowing story that successfully puts a spin on the art of visual storytelling. It's fast, action packed and utterly destructive, and the ‘You Tube’ generation are about to see some captured video that they wont forget.



Even if there's nothing new going on here, the style and quality of this film injects a terrific sense of terror into the old monster movie formula.
We're watching a videotape found after a devastating incident in Manhattan that's been codenamed "Cloverfield". We see the young couple Rob and Beth (Stahl-David and Yustman) on an idyllic morning, then cut to a party a month later bidding farewell as Rob heads off to a new job in Japan. But just after midnight, the party is interrupted by the arrival of a massive creature on the streets, and Rob hits the streets with a handful of friends looking for a way out. Once they rescue Beth.

The overwhelming familiarity of the premise is actually rather clever, with the Godzilla-style destruction of New York filmed Blair Witch-style on home video. This makes the film look deceptively rough and cheap, when it's actually skilfully (and expensively) designed, with excellent effects that feel disarmingly offhanded and a strong cast that delivers its dialog and sprints through each scene as if it's all improv. As a result, we are thrown right into the story, and the scary bits actually make us jump and squirm in our seats.

There's not much more to it than that, although there are strong echoes of 9/11, plus a pointed jab at American military policy willing to lay waste to the city just to kill the marauding beast. And the double-layer videotape adds an emotional element as we see glimpses Rob and Beth's much happier day every time the camera stops filming. These touches, as well as the general urgency of the pace, help overcome the corny and contrived opening set-up sequences.

But it's the film's technical prowess that's the most impressive, as the staggering scope of events is captured in handheld footage that contains several big jolts and some truly haunting imagery. The sheer relentless horror of the story is thoroughly gripping, and the raucous chaos keeps us entertained right to the head-spinning finale. So in the end, if it's not much more than a guilty pleasure, that's fine with us. Just let us get back to our relatively quiet lives in a world where these kinds of things can't happen. Right?








During a leaving party for Rob (Stahl-David) something attacks New York and stands between him and the woman he loves (Yustman). So begins a race to rescue the girl and avoid getting eaten, all viewed via camcorder.



It’s extremely rare in modern cinema to see a film that strikes you as genuinely new. Not just excellent – we’ve been spoiled in that department in the last six months – but properly like nothing that you’ve laid eyes on before. In the last fifteen years, Pulp Fiction, Scream, The Matrix and arguably Bourne and Jurassic Park have all done it, shaking out genres as old as celluloid and making them seem sparkly new, becoming future templates in the process. Cloverfield could come to be equally revered and imitated, such is its level of whip-smart invention and brilliant simplicity. It’s a film that treads the well-worn steps of many monster movies past, but flits through them as if on virgin territory.

Arriving in the wake of such a hulking marketing campaign should leave any resultant movie scuttling apologetically behind, embarrassed about making such a fuss and meakly failing to deliver. Since the first infuriatingly spare trailer hit cinemas, anyone with a phone line and keyboard has been trying to piece together this mystery from soft drink adverts, smudgy photos and red herrings. The big secret, as we all should have predicted, is that there is no big secret. Cloverfield showed its hand from the off, but it’s the way in which it plays that hand that causes it to win big.

The brainchild of producer JJ Abrams and director Matt Reeves couldn’t be simpler in story. A big monster attacks a city so a guy, and his friends, sets off to get his gal and get outta town, pre-squashing. We’ve seen it on screens since man first discovered the alchemy of rubber suit and model village, but never with quite the same immediacy and all-encompassing horror.

After a sly intro in which we learn this entire film was found on a site “formerly known as Central Park”, we meet our hero Rob (Michael Stahl-David), his secret love Beth (Odette Yustman) and, more importantly, his video camera, as they enjoy a day together. Then we head to a party to mark his departure for a new life in Japan. Here the camera is handed over to the cheerfully dorkish, occasionally irritating, Hud (T J Miller), our eyes for the next hour. The festivities are rudely interrupted when something explodes downtown and decapitates the Statue of Liberty. It’s a sequence that horrifies more than a simple monster arrival should, particularly since we haven’t seen him yet.

Is this attack so terrifying because it has obvious shades of 9/11 or because the handheld camerawork leaves us disoriented, glimpsing the enormous creature only when Hud’s view quivers that way? It’s both. We live in a time when global violence is recorded not by professionals, but by shaky-handed bystanders with camera phones. We believe bad camerawork and suspect professional broadcast of hiding something from us. Stripped of the comfort of rhythmic editing and frenzied strings that tell us it’s time to be scared and instead served the sort of frantic footage we associate with unfathomable terror brings a new, more primal fear to the monster movie. It starts, bizarrely, to feel like something that could happen.

Reeves, who’s been near anonymous in the pre-release hype, is masterful at choosing shots without appearing to do so. We view this unlovely goliath from all angles – a fleeting leg here, full-length in crafty helicopter shots on news footage there – but he’s even more effective as an unseen presence. There’s equal, if not more, dread in hearing furious roars as our band cowers in a side street, watching the military throwing everything they have uselessly at the beast. This is as much a triumph of sound design as of seamlessly blended CG and unsettling camerawork.

Wise to the fact that the most frightening attack is the one without apparent reason, Cloverfield never chooses to explain its monster’s arrival. It’s suddenly there and, as one soldier notes, “it’s winning”. It intends to scare, not educate. The constant air of panic is so pervasive that it’s easy to miss the skilful creation of the sequences, which include a rescue from a collapsing skyscraper and a tunnel sequence so butt-clenching you’ll crap diamonds for a week.

There will undoubtedly be those who don’t enjoy it, and some will have probably decided on that before seeing a frame. Anti-populist party poopers could very well pick apart the fact that the characters are archetypes and that there’s no hidden depth beneath the fright (although you could pub rant for hours about political subtext). But unmissable cinema does not have to be about mellifluous dialogue, intricate framing or enriching the mind or soul. It can just as legitimately come from a sensory experience like no other, that you can feel nowhere else but in that dark room in front of that silver screen. And you have never experienced anything like Cloverfield.





A dazzling experiment that paid off immensely, this is cinematic pleasure at its purest. One caveat: If they ever make a sequel, we’re taking two stars back.







Lizzy Caplan ...  Marlena
Jessica Lucas ...  Lily
T.J. Miller ...  Hud
Michael Stahl-David ...  Rob Hawkins
Mike Vogel ...  Jason Hawkins
Odette Yustman ...  Beth McIntyre
Anjul Nigam ...  Bodega Cashier
Margot Farley ...  Jenn
Theo Rossi ...  Antonio
Brian Klugman ...  Charlie
Kelvin Yu ...  Clark
Liza Lapira ...  Heather
Lili Mirojnick ...  Lei
Ben Feldman ...  Travis
Elena Caruso ...  Party Goer




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