Unfettered Blather

I’m not a big gamer or moviegoer these days. Once upon a time I used to play pretty much everything and watch just about anything that looked mildly interesting. I don’t have that much time these days due to the businesses I run so when I do game or watch a movie it takes time directly away from other endeavors or forces me to stay up well past bed time. These are reasons that I tend to judge things a little more harshly I suppose than I used to. That being said, I am looking for a good time and if I think something will offer that I give it a fair shot because I really want to have said good time.

I was up late watching Cloverfield and I must say the entire experience was akin to watching a well made Sci-Fi original movie. To those familiar with Sci-Fi movie productions, this is hardly a compliment. Cloverfield received billings as being a “post 9/11″ monster film. I suppose the world itself has changed since most people actually realized life isn’t peaches and cream when it comes to foreign enemies, but unlike the majority of the reviewers, I don’t give Cloverfield points for adopting this trite and cheap way to ellicit emotional responses. I see constant jokes about using 9/11 as a motive for terror alerts or the ham fisted insinuation that it is exploited to keep people in fear. I can hardly give the opposing viewpoint a free pass for using it to sell movies for emotional resonance without saying they are participating in the same behavior they so readily accuse others of.

So what is Cloverfield? In a nut shell the story is the Blair Witch Project with a giant monster thing terrorizing Manhattan. The story begins at a party where a sorry bunch of socially stunted wannabe New York socialites are holding a going away party for a tragically inept friend who sleeps with a long time friend and love interest only to avoid her after said evening causing a love cliche that will permeate and drive the actions of the cast for the duration of the film. So much for the claims the film is unique. Yes, this is a monster movie, bear with me, because I had to.

The surprise party they hold for this shaggy 20-something is shown from the perspective and narration of hsi obnoxious friend who films the event from a first person perspective. This setting eats up the first quarter of the film. It seems to drag on forever and the shaky camera style and lack of focus on any character for more than a few seconds makes you want to wrest control of the camera away from the narrator and beat his skull in for stupidity. This is where Cloverfield makes it’s first series of major mistakes. The characters aren’t very likable as in most films. They are cardboard interpretations of real people from people who have spent entirely too much time in Los Angeles and North Hollywood around fellow cliche riddle cardboard cut-outs.

While their reactions and actions aren’t all totally stupid (mainly because they seem to accept whats going on around them - take note science fiction movie authors) the simple fact is the painfully excessive party scene reveals them to be mostly shallow people I could never imagine myself being friends with. This kills the connection fairly quickly and instead of being a cheap and overused method to make them more human and approachable it only served to make me care even less about most of them if they had spared us the dithering and kept their stupid maws shut. One character is downright unpleasant from the first moment we meet her.

And that’s the next cardinal sin of the film. The entire film is recorded on a video camera with the overbearing shaky image approach which includes such grating things as:

Repeatedly dropping the camera
Random image switching
Lack of focus
Never focusing on one thing for too long.

While this is understandable to the plot of panicked people in extraordinary circumstance, Abrams didn’t seem to have the good sense to know when to let it go. In a few rare scenes it does actually work well to convey scale or terror. The bulk of the film abuses the above tricks in a near seamless rotation between them meaning at times when the camera should steady just a tad or give us a nice clean shot for the sake of the story, it doesn’t even manage to do that. Instead immediately rotating back to one of the listed cliches. The film never really balances this out to any satisfaction and comes off as overbearing and in a few cases (oddly enough in the moments not driven by panic) flat out disorienting. Even scenes where the characters are resting and trying to make sense of the situation, the cheap tricks just keep coming. It ruins what impact the camera aspect might have had. I pity any person with a equilibrium issues trying to watch it because it gave me a hard time.

The film ends in typical cliche modern Hollywood style where we are given hints about the monster, no real reason for the events and an ending that while expected drops on top of you. Cloverfield is one of those films that just ends and while you can see it coming the entire premise feels like a tease more than anything. You don’t have any doubts how it will end, they blandly state it at the first of the film, but getting there seems long and unnecessary and when the end does arrive you are given a sense of a terribly incomplete experience mixed with a certain pain for having endured the mess just to see if at some point they could bring it together.

In the end Cloverfield is a Frankenstein collection of film tricks and current fads, hailed as something it’s not, and thats inventive. The entire film is the application of a sloppy romance with transparent people set the tune of a standard giant monster story as a backdrop. Pretty much everything in the film we’ve seen before expect it makes no real attempt to make it anything more than make it feel disjointed to add a sense of supposed realism and at the end of the day it just feels like we’ve seen it all before, except in much better movies.

The only complaint I don’t have is with the main character’s near inhuman effort to save the girl. Most films suffer from making him indecisive and while still a pussy for not expressing his love for her and running away like a 15 year old from her in the first place, there is something to be said for a film where the main character will stride down a street with a 50 story tall monster at the end of it because it’s standing in his way.

Cloverfield has it’s moments but they are very rare and seemingly random events where all of the cheap tricks come together for a few brief seconds to make it work. At times I tired of the journey with these people, at a few you find yourself staring, waiting for what comes next. Overall the moments of interest are simply rough patches that jar you on a bland highway in some visual desert. Movies are about an entire experience but Cloverfield struck me as a collection of moments, some good, most off balance and a movie to me is something that entertains entirely, not in small, random spurts.

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