Cloverfield is a movie that’s going to get a lot of flak from a lot of people in just about every major camp. Its obvious critics won’t like it because it has virtually no plot. Art house hipsters won’t dig it because it’s a monster movie and it’s ridiculously far fetched. And yes, even the mainstream theatergoers won’t like it because it is fragmented, disorienting, and lacks conventional structure or resolution. I’m here to tell you, as a dissenting voice, that this film is fucking beautiful.
Never before have I seen an aesthetic established, held, and sustained that sells itself so well as to become an integral part of the storytelling. You can say it’s been done before, and yes, it has, but never this well or to these ends. The film operates on a basic suspense horror level at first glance, but it is also about the fragmentation of modern perception due to omnipresent technology and media. The film is viewed completely in first person shots of a man with a camera, dead set on documenting this important event in history that he cannot even come close to wholly understanding but through sheer intuition seems to grasp its magnitude and the necessity of its record.
The opening sequence of a party brilliantly lays the scene in fair Manhattan of hip young people engaged in their own society. There are relationship woes and romantic foibles for all and the use of non-actors draws us expertly into their flawed attempts at connection. The people who claim this film is bad because not enough is explained about the monster are missing the point completely. The film is, at its core, about the connection that one man feels for a woman, a connection so deep that he would be willing to risk his own life in the most dangerous of situations to be with her, and to make sure that she is safe. The film may be pessimistic on a large scale, but the purity of the emotions and the two final scenes generously make up for any criticism one could heap on it about being emotionally bankrupt.
This is a film that you’re either with or you’re not. If you stop to question how the battery on the camera has not run out three quarters of the way in its lost you. The film is designed in such a way as to keep you from being sidetracked. The way it is filmed almost makes you part of the actions that are occurring in all of their jumbled and obscure glory. Had the film been shot as a standard film it wouldn’t have a tenth of the impact.
Cloverfield is an intellectually fascinating, aesthetically astonishing, emotionally heartbreaking, and yes, extraordinarily entertaining film. It begs to be seen in theatres as its sound design and the sheer towering magnificence of its visuals are so very important to its experience. See it before it’s gone.
