Overview: After six months of discussing Cloverfield and bitching about the film’s relentless viral marketing (yet feeling compelled to discuss every aspect of it): it actually felt a little anti-climatic when I sat down to watch the completed film last week.
Initial thoughts? It works…with some exceptions.
Plot: A tight-knit group of fashion models attempt to survive a 40-story monster’s rampage through the streets of Manhattan.
The Good: Despite a 12 year hiatus from features, Director Matt Reeves’ re-enters the scene with a fairly original take on the classic monster-film genre.
While the creators have clearly taken a cue from things like The Blair Witch Project, The Host and the real horrors of The 9/11, applying those elements to a Godzilla-style monster movie is pretty inspired. Reeves’ never manages to achieve the chill-inducing realism of something like United 93 – but it’s certainly not bad for a sophomore effort.
The hand-held work is pretty great and the frantic, quick-cutting nature of the shots help to keep costs down (no lingering pauses requiring heavy FX, etc). Note that I didn’t feel the whole “nausea” thing, although reports of widespread Cloverfield motion sickness are out there.
Of course, a monster movie is nothing if the creature itself doesn’t deliver. In Cloverfield’s case, it’s a mixed bag.
When the beast’s presence is felt via the soundtrack or a quick, partially-obstructed shot – it’s masterful. However, when we start getting full-frontal views later in the film: I was a little disappointed in the actual design. The best description I can think of is Pumpkinhead meets King Kong meets Golum and the thing from The Host. I can’t explain why, but I just didn’t dig it. The other benefit of the early scenes is that some fairly shoddy effects are well-masked by the aforementioned camera-work, liberal amounts of dust and debris. Less just seems to be more here.
In terms of the actors, they’re all fairly forgettable. Lizzy Caplan probably did the most with her role, although I have a feeling she was simply directed to “look and act exactly like Zooey Deschanel, but cheaper”.
Jessica Lucas is very, very nice to look at. I can not remember anything else about her in the film.
The Bad: JJ Abrams loves hot people.
I can accept that while the vast majority of real spies do not look like Jennifer Garner, Michael Vartan and Maggie Q, you need movie star-looks for the stylized nature of those projects.
And while the high percentage of Lost castaways who could double as GQ or Vogue cover models is probably far higher than your usual pool of airline passengers: it’s television. Drop-dead gorgeous is a pre-requisite.
Unfortunately, when you’re casting a reality-based/pseudo-documentary project: you need to pay a little more attention to finding actors who actually represent a believable sample of the population rather than the people you attend dinner parties with.
Walk the streets of Manhattan for a day. Please note:
- NOT EVERYONE IS A MODEL.
- NOT EVERYONE IS UNDER 30.
- NOT EVERYONE IS WHITE.
Now, this would all be moot if any of the characters were even remotely interesting. Unfortunately, every one of them is an Abrams’ cliche: beautiful, wealthy white folks dealing with mind-numbingly boring relationship issues/20-something angst. If you’ve watched an episode of Felicity, What about Brian or Six Degrees – you’ve already met them.
Normally Abrams’ pretty-people-fetish doesn’t detract from the story, but it just instantly took me out of what I was watching here. It’s all the more frustrating because it could have been so easily corrected. Cast normal, cast ugly, cast diverse, but don’t cast out of the J Crew catalog.
Oh, also the film really isn’t very scary…which is kind of a negative for the genre. Reeves fumbles several sequences that seem like lay-ups (example: 4 characters wandering down a dark subway tunnel) by failing to build properly build tension and/or delivering a lame pay-off.
In summary:
Flawed, but worth seeing. I’ll miss talking about the viral marketing and resulting Blog hits until the sequel.
To be fair to Abrams, Jennifer Lucas is a black woman.
So she’s the token black guy.
That’s kind of true.
She’s essentially Francie from Alias or the black limo driver/gang banger (not a joke) from Six Degrees or the black character from What about Brian that (oh wait. all seven Brian cast members were white).
I’m not looking for diversity for diversity’s sake, but for a “reality”-based NYC-set movie: can we mix it up a little?
As I did mention, though: if any of the characters were sympathetic, interesting or in any way memorable, it wouldn’t matter.