Cloverfield
It’s been a long time coming. I’ve wanted to watch this movie since the first cryptic glimpses were shown before Transformers—so cryptic and mysterious, in fact, we didn’t even get a name, only a date: 01-18-08.
First a little background. If you already know about the marketing campaign behind Cloverfield, feel free to skip to my review. JJ Abrams, who produced Cloverfield with director Matt Reeves, is known for orchestrating clever viral marketing campaigns for his film and television projects which include Alias, Mission: Impossible III, Lost, Fringe, and the current blockbuster Star Trek—a super awesome movie on its own, but more on that another time.
Abrams’ hit TV series Lost was heavily supported by a huge viral marketing campaign and elaborate mythology designed to attract dedicated and fervent fans. The fictional Oceanic Airlines was created entirely in a fictional universe but has its own website, cross-series appearances,—another one of Abrams’ clever touches—and even a detailed fictional history.
Another piece of the alternate universe includes the
Dharma Initiative—whose logo
shows up on a title card in
Cloverfield!—and
many, many others.
His newer series Fringe also benefits from intricate mysteries woven into the plot: coded commercial break images, eerie recurring patterns in backgrounds, and more fictional corporate holdings.
For Cloverfield—a project so secretive that auditions were conducted with material from past Abrams productions like Alias and Felicity and the stars weren’t given scripts until days before the start of principal photography—Abrams relied on the power of the Internet and the curiosity of fans to seek and figure out what the cryptic teaser trailer was about.
Then more esoteric viral marketing hit. Several sharp-eyed fans spotted a
Slusho logo on
one character’s shirt and uncovered the first bit of information about the film. The
official website had photos showing up one-by-one daily and one such photo had an odd recipe written on the back—the last ingredient being
Kaitei no mitsu, a deep sea extract that purportedly flavors Slusho. Theories pointed to an agitated sea monster that was awoken by Japanese ships extracting the nutrient from deep sea trenches. Note that
none of this is mentioned or even alluded to in the film; it’s entirely the viewer’s obligation to want to find out more. We grew up in the Internet Age with YouTube and Google and Twitter and Facebook at our fingertips, and possess far greater social awareness than any generation—the last thing we’d want is to be told what to watch. Placing the control in moviegoers’ hands makes the mystery far more enticing to solve, a refreshing change from contrived Hollywood plots begging for attention.
Abrams’ masterstroke is including his ‘fake’ products in everything; Slusho shows up in Alias, Star Trek, and even Heroes. Fake worldwide news reports were released about the oil tanker that capsized early in the movie, which was the first sign of trouble. MySpace accounts were created for every main character. This blending of alternate reality events into real world media serves to further blur the lines between the film and real life, the key to viral marketing.
And then we get to the review. I must first say you will be doing yourself a great disservice by reading anything about this film before you have experienced it for yourself, and though I will try not to spoil the film, I cannot promise much with my limited critiquing skills.
Several title cards indicate the following is recovered video evidence for the Department of Defense case file codename “Cloverfield” from an area formerly known as “Central Park”. It was Robert “Rob” Hawkins’ last night in New York City before he flies to Japan to take the position of Vice President at an unnamed corporation. His brother, Jason Hawkins and girlfriend Lily Ford, along with best friend Hudson “Hud” Platt planned a huge surprise farewell party to send him off right, with Lily tasking Jason to going around the party and filming friends and guests’ well-wishes for Rob to take with him to Japan. After insisting it was a bitch job, he passes the camera to Hud who initially was reluctant—he pointed it mainly at his crush, Marlena Diamond, who’ve met Lily a couple of times but didn’t really know the rest of the group—but soon warmed to the idea of documenting the evening.
A month before the surprise party, Rob woke up after sleeping with a previously platonic friend, Elizabeth “Beth” McIntyre, and brought a camera along on their trip to Coney Island to document Beth’s first time there. Jason and Hud ‘borrowed’ Rob’s camera for the party without realizing there was previously recorded footage, so they accidentally recorded over much of Rob and Beth’s Coney Island trip. Beth shows up late at the surprise party with a male friend much to Rob’s dismay and they have a fight in the stairwell. Beth leaves for her apartment as Jason and Hud—still carrying the camera—try to console Rob on the fire escape stairs when a minor earthquake blacks out the area. This is when the film really begins.
Much as been said about the shaky camerawork in Cloverfield and the complaints are completely valid and understandable. If you suffer from motion sickness, this is probably not the best movie for you. Abrams and Reeves take no liberties with smoothing out the action with a Steadicam or even just a professional cameraman—it’s been reported that perhaps 30% of the film was actually filmed by T. J. Miller, the actor who plays Hud. There are several vomit-inducing running scenes where I was practically screamed at the screen for Hud to hold the camera steady, and several times when motion sickness-induced migraines set in. But if you can get over this one artistic conceit, the rest of the film will be much more enjoyable. It also performed the important task of maintaining the ‘realistic’ illusion Abrams and Reeves wanted for the film.
The authenticity offered by a truly amateur cameraman adds much to the immediacy and realism of the film, lending a sense of real fear and anxiousness that smooth Steadicam shots just cannot capture. Paul Greengrass understood this perfectly when he directed the second and third Bourne films; he deliberately destabilized his Steadicam operator to get realistic movement, though his films have nothing on Cloverfield’s epic migraine-level camerawork.
Not only was Cloverfield a thrilling and—at times—even scary monster movie it’s also a lovely, short romantic tragedy. The first twenty minutes were devoid of any monster action—instead focused more on Lily, Jason, and Hud’s preparations for the party spliced with Rob and Beth’s Coney Island trip footage—and I found it equally enjoyable. Rob and Beth are two long-time friends who clearly adored each other for ages but never acted on their feelings until a month before Rob heads off to Japan. No footage exists between then and now so when Beth shows up at Rob’s surprise party with a guy, many questions were raised—questions that you, through Hud and the camera, want solved. By limiting the points of view to a single camera, the film effectively wipes out any omniscient thoughts, limiting the viewer to what you would see and hear in real life: just what’s directly around you. You, the viewer, knows only as much as Hud knows, and no more. There’s something refreshingly frank and gimmick-free about that, an innocence lost in most Hollywood films these days.
I loved the constant reminder of Rob’s poor choice of last words to Beth as she left the party in the form of his brother and his girlfriend. Jason and Lily are practically married—but not really, though, much to Lily’s chagrin—and when trouble struck they anxiously yelled out in the darkness and chaos for each other. In times of crisis, your loved ones should be by your side under your protection, but instead, Rob drove Beth away with their fight, back to her apartment in Midtown where the monster is destroying buildings and flattening vehicles. Wracked with guilt and an almost irrational desire to protect her, Rob decides to run uptown towards the monster to save Beth. Several reviews I’ve read thought this was a weak plot point but they fail to see how futile their survival odds were. As Hud sullenly states halfway through the movie, “our options are [to] die here, die in the tunnels, or die in the streets.” Making their way uptown to rescue Beth is reasonable given their already slim chance of survival.
The juxtaposition of snippets of Rob and Beth’s lovely trip to Coney Island and Hud’s footage of their first few hours of survival was nicely done, all during times when the camera was not recording over the past footage and when the camera was damaged. Their carefree joy and happiness with each other looks so foreign in the chaos and despair of the present-time monster attack. Hud talks incessantly under pressure and says some hilarious things behind the camera. His attraction to Marlena and her absolute lack of any reciprocated feelings was a good source of comic relief in the early half of the film. Her warming to Hud after fighting off monster hatchlings together felt genuine and well done.
That’s not to say the film is without fault. Several shots were excessively shaky and blurry, as if to cover up some rough CGI work. The camera battery is also dubiously long-lasting and the medical triage scenes were ho-hum. The gang’s chance encounter with the Army using the Bloomingdales as a triage ward seemed far too convenient, as does having a sympathetic army soldier who sneaks them out to find Beth when orders were to put them on the next chopper out. The film itself was well edited but I couldn’t help but feel it’s still a bit short. I would’ve liked to see perhaps one extra scene in the middle with them making their way uptown.
The ending was appropriately poignant yet miserable, in ways many Hollywood endings aren’t. I finished the film feeling drained and battered as if I’d also spent my night running from the monsters. And yet I enjoyed it. The completely seamless illusion was not marred by poor CGI work, editing, or acting. There were very few moments where I thought to myself, ‘that can’t be right’ or ‘how is that possible?’ and for a film about a 350-foot monster rampage through New York City, that’s definitely saying something.
In short, this film comes highly, highly recommended by me. It’s not often that a film so realistically thrills me in such a way that I could barely stop thinking about it for days. I’m a terrible film snob and heavily cynical towards the whole movie-making trade, but the film’s unwavering attention to realism—“Wow, this really happened!”—and spirited execution tore right through my jaded heart. For the first time in a long time, I feel that childhood awe and amazement at watching a great film and completely not knowing how they pulled it off. I’ve reached a whole new level of respect for filmmakers and all of their below the line help in doing what films do best: transporting the audience to places and experiences they’ve never had before.
More information
While researching this post, I came across several fascinating behind-the-scenes videos, the best one showing off the Cloverfield monster at SIGGRAPH 2008.
If you carefully watch the very last scene, where Rob and Beth are on the Coney Island Ferris Wheel, the footage shot of the beachfront shows something crashing into the sea in the far distance. It is the Japanese government satellite “ChimpanzIII” that unexpectedly crash-landed into the Atlantic. It ties into the huge viral marketing campaign for Cloverfield as belonging to the Tagruato mining company which owns, among other companies, the makers of Slusho!. It has been suggested the mining for key Slusho! ingredients was what originally provoked the Cloverfield creature.
At the very, very end of the film after the credits, there is a quiet garbled sound that when played backwards it states “It’s still alive…”, paving the way for a second Cloverfield film, though JJ Abrams insists it won’t ‘just’ be a normal sequel.
An incredible amount of information is available on the Blu-ray release of Cloverfield. A “Special Investigations Mode” plays the movie as if it were a case file for the Department of Defense—the film played in a box with of the screen dedicated to a map of Manhattan with the current location of the LSA and hundreds of noteworthy facts peppered throughout the movie.
