Cloverfield
Directed by Matt Reeves
It’s the Cloverfield hype campaign—not the dissatisfying, unimpressive film itself—that is the work of art. Surely Warhol would have appreciated the exploitation of pop memory and cultural anxiety that is detonated in the scenes of casually frolicking Americans unexpectedly stunned by the sudden disaster of the Statue of Liberty’s head being tossed into the street like a deflated football. Recalling Warhol’s disaster photographs, Cloverfield commemorates horror as a banal fact of everyday life. That’s what 9/11 has come to mean for the heartless filmmakers and bloodthirsty Gen-X/Y audience of Cloverfield.
Cloverfield’s F/X—admittedly startling, convincing and disgusting—reduce national tragedy to the mindlessness of a video game. That’s essentially all that television is (add an amphibian behemoth), and Cloverfield transfers the gross insensitivity of reality TV to the big screen. Yuppie Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David) has a going-away party. His best friend Hud (T.J. Miller) records the party with a video camera and never looks away. The premise is what Hud captures on his videocam the moment that a monster descends upon New York City.
At just the moment you thought The Blair Witch Project was safely forgotten, that its perpetrators were now employed as Wal-Mart greeters and all the sheep who fell for that hoax back in 1999 had vacated the premises—or moved on to Inland Empire—along comes Cloverfield’s new video skullduggery. (Too bad Frank Darabont didn’t use video technology for his more credible 9/11 thriller, The Mist.) Unlike Blair Witch, Cloverfield was made by pros, TV tycoons producer J.J. Abrams and director Matt Reeves of Lost and Felicity. That means Cloverfield is slick, not Blair Witch-stupid. Reeves-Abrams are indeed skilled; they turn a monster movie into a visually compelling but shameless narrative.
The game in Cloverfield is to exploit media-memory of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack and encourage moviegoers who were probably in grade school, and not quite senescent at the time, to pretend to relive that terror—while feeling safely nostalgic. Pitiful truth is, Cloverfield is so snazzy-smart-cold that it never achieves the understanding of tragedy that made the Final Destination movies such a unique harbinger of mortality and post-9/11 anxiety. Reeves’ subway scenes don’t come near the nightmarishly harsh simplicity of Final Destination 3’s subway death knells.
It’s unhelpful that reviewers pretend to critique this film’s implausibilities. Most viewers will instinctively know that the makers of Cloverfield are on-target about parading insensitivity to the plight of humanity’s future. That’s the mob-vulgar truth of movies from Pulp Fiction to There Will Be Blood—the monster-movie format is no different than such art-deviant works as Tarantino’s and P.T. Anderson’s. J.J. Abrams may be a mere movie runt in his heart, but he shrewdly assesses the culture’s decline.
Critic Prairie Miller’s assessment, “Mystery monster really mad at Manhattan on 1rampage,” sums up the depth of Abrams and Reeves’ concept. This exploitation film’s blatancy is preferable to—and more complicated than—the schlock of Bong Joon’s The Host. To pretend Cloverfield is anything more insults 9/11 as well as Godzilla. Ultimately, our culture is thoroughly indicted when the media accepts Cloverfield’s essential silliness after scoffing at the depth, beauty, terror and humanity of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.
Directed by Matt Reeves
It’s the Cloverfield hype campaign—not the dissatisfying, unimpressive film itself—that is the work of art. Surely Warhol would have appreciated the exploitation of pop memory and cultural anxiety that is detonated in the scenes of casually frolicking Americans unexpectedly stunned by the sudden disaster of the Statue of Liberty’s head being tossed into the street like a deflated football. Recalling Warhol’s disaster photographs, Cloverfield commemorates horror as a banal fact of everyday life. That’s what 9/11 has come to mean for the heartless filmmakers and bloodthirsty Gen-X/Y audience of Cloverfield.
Cloverfield’s F/X—admittedly startling, convincing and disgusting—reduce national tragedy to the mindlessness of a video game. That’s essentially all that television is (add an amphibian behemoth), and Cloverfield transfers the gross insensitivity of reality TV to the big screen. Yuppie Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David) has a going-away party. His best friend Hud (T.J. Miller) records the party with a video camera and never looks away. The premise is what Hud captures on his videocam the moment that a monster descends upon New York City.
At just the moment you thought The Blair Witch Project was safely forgotten, that its perpetrators were now employed as Wal-Mart greeters and all the sheep who fell for that hoax back in 1999 had vacated the premises—or moved on to Inland Empire—along comes Cloverfield’s new video skullduggery. (Too bad Frank Darabont didn’t use video technology for his more credible 9/11 thriller, The Mist.) Unlike Blair Witch, Cloverfield was made by pros, TV tycoons producer J.J. Abrams and director Matt Reeves of Lost and Felicity. That means Cloverfield is slick, not Blair Witch-stupid. Reeves-Abrams are indeed skilled; they turn a monster movie into a visually compelling but shameless narrative.
The game in Cloverfield is to exploit media-memory of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack and encourage moviegoers who were probably in grade school, and not quite senescent at the time, to pretend to relive that terror—while feeling safely nostalgic. Pitiful truth is, Cloverfield is so snazzy-smart-cold that it never achieves the understanding of tragedy that made the Final Destination movies such a unique harbinger of mortality and post-9/11 anxiety. Reeves’ subway scenes don’t come near the nightmarishly harsh simplicity of Final Destination 3’s subway death knells.
It’s unhelpful that reviewers pretend to critique this film’s implausibilities. Most viewers will instinctively know that the makers of Cloverfield are on-target about parading insensitivity to the plight of humanity’s future. That’s the mob-vulgar truth of movies from Pulp Fiction to There Will Be Blood—the monster-movie format is no different than such art-deviant works as Tarantino’s and P.T. Anderson’s. J.J. Abrams may be a mere movie runt in his heart, but he shrewdly assesses the culture’s decline.
Critic Prairie Miller’s assessment, “Mystery monster really mad at Manhattan on 1rampage,” sums up the depth of Abrams and Reeves’ concept. This exploitation film’s blatancy is preferable to—and more complicated than—the schlock of Bong Joon’s The Host. To pretend Cloverfield is anything more insults 9/11 as well as Godzilla. Ultimately, our culture is thoroughly indicted when the media accepts Cloverfield’s essential silliness after scoffing at the depth, beauty, terror and humanity of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.
