Wednesday, May 14, 2025



Movie Review: Cloverfield

From television producer J.J Abrams, television director Matt Reeves and television writer Drew Godard comes the fairly hair-raising monster mash “Cloverfield.” Told from the perspective of one unknowing partygoer’s handheld camera, the action of “Cloverfield” plays out like the scariest episode of “America’s Home Videos” ever. In fact, theaters are required to post signs warning ticket buyers about the motion sickness and nausea that some have experienced upon watching the film.

The film centers on would-be-Japanese-business-man Rob Howard on the eve of his departure from New York to bigger and better things. In a cliché Hollywood romantic subplot, he is, of course, in love with his best friend from college, Beth. Rob’s dumb, drunk and less impressive friend, Hud, is enlisted to videotape the surprise going-away party and, by minute 21, everything falls nicely into place.

Oh, but minute 22: enter monster in homicidal rage. I won’t describe the monster in fear of ruining anyone’s experience, but it has an original design and some very scary effects in the film. All in all, it’s a well-done piece of movie monster history.

After escaping the monster’s first spree upon the city, Rob and band of quasi-friends must turn back towards Manhattan—now the monster’s stomping ground—to rescue Beth, who is impaled upon a piece of rebar dangling from a skyscraper. Battling the huge monster, smaller crab monsters that fall from the larger one’s skin, not to mention frightened tourists and the American military, Rob’s saga is told from the never sober, yet somewhat loveable, handheld perspective of Hud.

Moments of fear, tenderness and triumph—all told from the drunken, dumb perspective of an asshole at a party with a camera. Abrams spent $30 million to make a movie about asshole hipsters at a party. No—my friends. Abrams spent $30 million to make a movie about us. A realistic monster movie—no myth, no legend. We never discover the monster’s name. Generic scientists never offer a trite explanation in this film. We see an impressively realistic representation of a modern-day monster attack. Things blow up, a lot of people die. The monster kills everything it sees. Lives are affected.

And the magic of “Cloverfield” lies in this last connection. Of course the film gets bogged down in its own “Hollywoodness,” but the intent is there: to offer a Hollywood film that actually happened to some kids in New York.

And herein lies “Cloverfield’s” faint scent of impressiveness—not greatness, but the impression of greatness, a slab of perfection that has yet to be chiseled into a “David.” “Cloverfield” should be seen as the point in which the handheld aesthetic of reality television and the modern skate video have truly been enveloped by the Hollywood machine. Costing roughly 500 times what “The Blair Witch Project” cost to produce, “Cloverfield” represents a new beast in cinema. Rather than the impression of something small making it through the cuts to a 5,000-theater release, the film is something massive re-imagining itself as something intimate, handheld and personal: a private reaction to intensely public circumstances.

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