Cloverfield (***1/4)

This is a monster movie, but not an old-fashioned one. The gimmick is that the whole movie is actually camcorder footage, filmed in and around the area “formerly known as Central Park” in New York City. Yep, this means 80 minutes of shaky images. It’s especially annoying in the exposition, which takes place at a surprise party full of twenty-somethings in a Manhattan high-rise. After 15 minutes of that, I was earnestly hoping that the beast would knock the whole building down and the camcorder would be found by a tripod-wielding Martin Scorsese.

But then, oddly, the gimmick started to work for me. At any rate, I did jump back in my seat more than once, and the technique provides a kind of intimacy that your average Godzilla movie lacks, though the story is no more sophisticated. Still, it succeeds precisely by not trying to do too much. Omitted are elaborately corny back-stories about estranged fathers, unimaginably daring rescues by unaccountably fearless hunks, and buildings that predictably collapse precisely half a second after said rescues. The basic story, credited to Drew Goddard, a writer on TV’s Lost, does rest on the male lead’s (Michael Stahl-David) willingness to aid his imperiled girlfriend, but doesn’t turn him into an action hero. Everyone seems appropriately scared when the beast is around, and tense the rest of the time, and so was I.

The monster looks like a big dinosaur and was fairly fearsome, though it’s only around for ten or fifteen minutes. There are a couple of other scary things, but revealing what they are would spoil the fun. Meanwhile, director Matt Reeves makes the camcorder idea work. In reality, the machine’s battery would have failed, or the tape would have run out, in the time taken by the events in the film, and maybe the friend holding the camera wouldn’t have been quite so conscientious about keeping it rolling during certain events, but the scenario still seemed more plausible than I’d have thought. You never really do learn how it is that a 50-story creature came suddenly to be terrorizing Manhattan, but that’s to the good. Trying to explain the preposterous only ruins the fun.

IMDB link

viewed and reviewed 1/14/08