A Quality Modern Monster Movie in "Cloverfield"

By Connect Mason Reporter Matt Green

Until its release, "Cloverfield" was most well known for its clandestine production and cleverly enigmatic marketing campaign, which began with a title-less teaser trailer and continued with secretive websites and the community that swarmed around to make sense of them. While many more cynical movie aficionados actually lowered their expectations in response to the hype, “Cloverfield” managed to snare itself a good amount of expectation amongst those most likely to want to see it: that is, 18 to 30 year old moviegoers.

After its release, the foremost question now is: Should you pay somewhat outrageous ticket fees to see it on the big screen? The answer is: Probably.

One’s first concern for this particular film is likely to be the cinematography, given that it’s fairly well known that the entire movie is shot with hand-held digital cameras. While the shaking and shimmying of the viewpoint can get a little excessive once in a while, I’m fairly sure that without the ‘Blair Witch’ style filming, this story would lose its principle charm, which happens to be that everything presented feels authentically raw.

It’s highly likely that the most important thing for “Cloverfield” to have accomplished is to feel like a hipster-produced disaster documentary distributed by a major studio rather than a major studio-produced disaster flick featuring hipster actors, and fortunately it does so.

This authenticity is translated well by the principle actors, most of which you probably wont recognize from anywhere. The dialog they spout, which not particularly eloquent or well-thought, sounds like conversations most people have much of the time. None of it comes off as rehearsed or for the benefit of the camera. This helps with the intensity as horrible things begin to happen and you sincerely believe that the people involved are caught up in the same moment you are.

Most people, however, will be drawn to the movie by the mystery of the monster, and the scenes involving the disasters it causes in Manhattan are the principal are the principal reasons to see this on the big screen. As a side note, writer Drew Goddard and director Matt Reeves took a big chance on realistically presenting large-scale carnage and destruction in New York given the fact that for the past few years it has been somewhat taboo to bring up such things.

While chilling, the widespread destruction was handled as well as could be, and if a monster disaster movie had tiptoed around such obvious damage to infrastructure nobody would take it seriously at all. The anonymity of the monster itself plays an important role in the tension of the beginning segment of the movie, so I shall not reveal too much here. I will, however, say that it was a decent-enough monster that its visage did not evoke any previously featured and well known cinematic monsters that have threatened various cities at various times.

Overall, “Cloverfield” is most likely worth buying a ticket to, or if you must wait, renting when it arrives on the format of your choice. There is on spectacularly stupid occurrence towards the end that resulted in something of an “Oh come on!” that has to do with proximity to monsters when you are trying to get away from them. But besides that, the movie is fairly solid. The love story doesn’t even come off as terribly hackneyed, so if your sweetie likes disaster/monster/horror films, bring them along too. There are certainly much worse things you could be watching.