On November 3rd, 1954, Toho Film in Japan released Gojiro, about a giant sea monster who lays waste to Tokyo. The film came out nine years after the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, and Gojiro was widely perceived as a metaphorical treatment of the nuclear horror. Gojiro was picked up for the American market, retitled Godzilla, was re-edited with new scenes featuring Raymond Burr, and became the author of a perplexingly popular series of films about Godzilla and numerous other monsters (most released in the 1960s and ’70s) and made with decreasing technical skill, yet nevertheless well-attended by little boys at that now-defunct weekly ritual, the Saturday matinee.

Cloverfield is a modern monster movie in which something strange, large, and unstoppable rises (presumably) from the sea and begins to tear apart lower Manhattan. But unlike Godzilla (and like Signs, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, and The Blair Witch Project), the story is told from street level, with the participants knowing little more than the viewer, and with one of the characters recording events on a small video camera.

Cloverfield has all the elements one associates with monster movies, but it is old wine in new bottles. Random people are gathered. The monster arrives and they are whittled away person by person. An escape is interrupted by the need to go back and rescue someone. Two antagonists have a surprising tender moment after one saves the other’s life.

What becomes quickly apparent is that the shaky handheld single camera “found footage” approach doesn’t really work. It didn’t work in the movie version of Friday Night Lights and it doesn’t work here. The theory is that the mobile camera makes the events more “real” and personal, but in fact they become impersonal and distanced. If producer J. J. Abrams and his acolytes, director Greg Reeves and writer Drew Goddard, had made a traditional movie, with good music and close-ups and sharp photography, and a classic surface approach to the story, viewers would have been better drawn into the events. The introductory 20 minutes or so is concerned with setting up the characters, who act and sound like bland sitcom refugees, or October Road meeting Godzilla. They include Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David), who has slept with Beth (Odette Yustman) (the act caught on self-shot tape), and who a month later is moving to Japan (an in joke?). The first act is set primarily at Rob’s going away party. His dim friend Hud Platt (T.J. Miller) is enlisted to film testimonials and the party itself, and he proves to be an incorrigible gossip, gleaning that Rob has slept with a hot girl at the party (while already having a girlfriend?). I assume that the petty concerns and jealousies and competitions among the party goers are meant to be highlighted as trivial in comparison to a natural disaster, which quickly happens, driving the kids onto the streets. There, occasional bravura long takes, such as one inside an electronic store, are as impressive as anything in Children of Men.

It’s been almost seven years since the attacks of 9/11. Cloverfield evokes memories of that time, especially with dust clouds roiling down the canyons of Manhattan as white-caked people flee or hide out in small shops. As with Godzilla, though, the connection of the monster to a previous disaster is tenuous. The film makes a thin gesture toward accounting for later actions of the characters based on their actions and dynamics at the party, but you can’t remember them all, and soon some are gone and you don’t know where. At root, all the films in this genre appeal to that occasional impatience we have with humanity that wants to see it squashed in wide swaths, what Susan Sontag called the imagination of disaster, the true emotional source of pop sci-films. Viewed in this light, there is something irresponsible about Cloverfield evoking a real disaster for dubious entertainment value, especially when the film distances the viewer, thanks to its visual technique, from the real lives and feelings of its characters.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.