Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008)
After all the viral marketing and secrecy, it turns out that there’s nothing that secret about Cloverfield. It’s exactly what it looked like in that original teaser trailer: basically, a giant monster terrorising New York, shot on a handycam by affluent yuppies who must run for their lives. The film is structured as an uninterrupted playback of the full contents of a memory card from a digital video camera; after a brief prelude, it starts with a party as these privileged young New Yorkers prepare to farewell their friend Rob with a surprise party. But then (as we saw in the teaser) there’s a blackout, and a distant explosion, and the head of the statue of liberty lands in their street. Cue running, and screaming, and a fair bit of stomping and biting.
It really is just Godzilla shot using Blair Witch-like methodology, and the makers of Cloverfield (director Matt Reeves and screenwriter Drew Goddard, overseen by producer-of-the-moment J.J. Abrams) rightly make no attempt to hide those influences. Yet there’s a third, more sombre influence in the mix here: the documentary 9/11, shot by brothers Jules and Gédéon Naudet in New York on the morning of 11 September 2001. That film started as a documentary about firefighters, but quickly turned into something else as the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre unfolded. It gave a chilling sense of what it was like to be be suddenly thrust from routine documentation into the midst of untold carnage, and Cloverfield shares much of the film’s specific imagery (collapsing buildings, all-engulfing dust plumes, bewildered and terrified crowds running down the streets of New York) as well as its frightening sense of being a first-person witness to the unimaginable. As such, Cloverfield is the latest example of the way in which our new-found familiarity with disaster gets folded back into the movie-going experience. The Naudet brothers’ film, and the ubiquitous news coverage with similar imagery, transformed Hollywood movies. The joky and generally idiotic disaster movies of the 1990s – typified by Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla (1998) – became instant museum pieces after such mass exposure to real life disaster. This isn’t a fresh observation, of course, but Cloverfield is interesting for two things: how explicitly it references that disaster, and how it moves through and beyond the initial shock at those events to try and become just another genre film.
There are no doubt a whole host of film academics working on books and theses about the post-traumatic psychology of post-9/11 Hollywood filmmaking, but watching Cloverfield you almost see their work becoming redundant. There’s nothing really to analyse: all the post-traumatic themes are right there on the surface, to the extent that you could barely call the 9/11 imagery here a subtext. The chain of cinematic responses to 9/11 has become improbably neat: we move from serious-minded direct approaches to the material (World Trade Center, United 93); to conventional but sombre science fiction disaster movies with imagery and tone obliquely influenced by 9/11 (Spielberg’s War of the Worlds); and now we get a film that is much more direct in its reference to 9/11 and which plugs the whole event back into a genre that was born from exactly this kind of trauma. The original Japanese Gojira / Godzilla was an overt response to the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now that model is revived to help Americans work through the psychic aftershocks of September 11. That Cloverfield seems to have captured the imagination more than the Emmerich Godzilla did back in 1998 is partly due to it being a vastly superior movie, but also to its increased timeliness.
What I think is causing some shock about Cloverfield, however, is how aggressive it is in reconfiguring the 9/11 experience as entertainment. As I wrote only two and a half years ago when reviewing War of the Worlds, at that time it felt like a disaster movie had to take its subject matter deadly seriously. By contrast, Cloverfield is harrowing, but it’s clearly meant as an enjoyable kind of fright, much more along the lines of a conventional action-horror. When I noted the influence of the Naudet brothers’ documentary on the film, it was the iconography, first-person perspective and sense of immersion that I was getting at. The sense of real human suffering that the Naudet brothers documented, and which hung like a cloud over the earlier post-9/11 films I have mentioned, is largely absent. We are back to devastation for thrills: it’s just that now we are much better informed about what that devastation might look like. Not being a psychologist, I have no idea whether this re-absorption of real horror back into safe entertainment should be seen as a healthy development or not. But there’s no doubt that despite its superficial realism, Cloverfield feels like a ride. I mean that quite literally: as Drew McWeeny (writing as “Moriarty” over at Ain’t It Cool) has pointed out, its first person experience has an uncanny resemblance to those theme park rides where they strap you into a chair for a pretend guided tour… only to plunge you into a manufactured crisis that you are supposed to believe is really happening to you.
This brings us back to the first-person / found footage device that structures the film. I felt that The Blair Witch Project demonstrated that such an approach can achieve a remarkable level of audience involvement; I think that film worked so effectively as horror because people started to react to its events almost as if they were really happening to them. Yet I also think that people underestimated what an achievement it was to create a film that so effectively emulated the feel of real home movie footage. I haven’t really seen anyone try to dismiss Cloverfield as artless in the way that so many did with Blair Witch, probably because the presence of elaborate special effects makes it seem more clearly a “proper movie.” Yet Cloverfield is much less successful at the basic goal of emulating real home movie footage than Blair Witch was, for a number of reasons. Firstly, Blair Witch never claimed to be unassembled footage: it cut between two cameras, so obviously someone had edited it together to get the best available viewpoint on each scene and to remove footage that wasn’t of interest. Cloverfield, by contrast, pretends to be a completely unmediated download from the handycam , which is a bigger stretch, as it asks us to accept that the film has been perfectly shot and edited in-camera. Our magic camera catches no long periods of dull irrelevancy (partly due to some very unlikely jump cuts during dialogue), but always seems to get the key moments we need to see. (Our cameraman continues filming when no sane person would, and Reeves lacks the flexibility of cutting to a second viewpoint that the Blair Witch premise afforded). Even more incredible, it manages to include flashbacks through the device of having the disaster footage filmed over an earlier tape: it’s one of those ideas that’s a little too clever, because the accidental assemblage of past and present footage is so impossibly neat. But what is probably more fatal is that the performances, dialogue, and narrative structure simply never seem natural enough. This is revealing about how the apparent similarities in production methods for the two movies actually only run skin deep. Blair Witch was semi-improvised by actors who had limited information about how events would unfold, and who were put through as close to the fictional experience as possible. Cloverfield is just a conventionally scripted movie shot with shaky cameras, and can’t catch anything like the palpable realism that the Blair Witch methodology produced. Drew Goddard’s screenplay is just too scripted: there’s too strong a dramatic arc, too many expository monologues, and too neat a resolution, for it ever to feel like real life. Reeves and Goddard would have gotten a more interesting (and I suspect more immersive) film if they had been willing to abandon the safety net of a traditional narrative structure in return for a film that felt more like the real deal.
Which isn’t to say that the film doesn’t create a sense of visceral immersion in its action sequences: like those theme park rides, it’s exciting. The structure of the overall film might leave you picking apart the phony moments, but when the big creature starts doing his stuff, or its nasty little offspring start leaping out of the dark, it’s still very effective. One benefit of the hand-held camera genre that Cloverfield does share with Blair Witch is the way it undercuts our usual expectation that the central characters will survive: we are told in the opening scene that the video camera was found in Central Park, inviting the conclusion that none of the characters will make it to safety. It lends an extra sense of unpredictability and jeopardy as the protagonists are attacked. The shaky camera also adds to the drama by concealing the threat: our looks at the creature are fleeting glimpses until close to the end, and many moments of the film have a “what was that?” quality to them. That the effects are successfully incorporated into such wildly shaking camera work is impressive; indeed, the effects are generally remarkable given that the budget wasn’t especially high for this kind of film (a reported $30 million, compared to $130 million for Emmerich’s Godzilla nearly a decade earlier). I suspect a big part of that success is that the creature work was done by the Phil Tippett studio: Tippett is a veteran of such effects going back to the days of stop-motion effects and has history with both mega-budget and relatively low budget movies (running the gamut from Jurassic Park and Starship Troopers to Tremors 2). The monster here is extremely convincing, and the portrait of a large city in disarray is very well done.
There is already talk of a Cloverfield sequel; director Matt Reeves has said this could revolve around other groups of people who were in the city and simultaneously documenting the event. I’m not sure that is the right approach: I’d be more interested in seeing a more conventionally shot movie that followed events from a more omniscient perspective but which was informed by, and intersected with, the events and characters we see here. A handy-camera shot sequel risks simply repeating the exercise… Unless, having laid down their framework here, the filmmakers were willing to have more faith in the “found footage” premise and create something looser and more improvisational.