I loved Cloverfield. LOVED it. I seem to vaguely recall some backlash against the movie at the time, like people thought the kaiju-style monster destroying NYC looked too fake and thus the movie went downhill, from good when the monster was only glimpsed to bad when the monster started dominating shots. I completely disagree! The increased visibility of the monster tracked well with the narrative; the creature looked unreal, which is different from fake; and if anyone felt the monster’s screentime negatively impacted the suspension of disbelief element … all I can say is that those people are picking a weird thing to hone in on amidst all of the other egregious violations of S-o-D.
There is in fact very little in Cloverfield that doesn’t violate suspension of disbelief. Just to contrast it with the other found footage film I’ve already mentioned, one of the things I really appreciated about Paranormal Activity was that the actors playing Micah and Katie looked very normal and unglamorous, which obviously enhanced the verisimilitude. As opposed to Cloverfield, which has a cast full of improbably beautiful people (well, three beautiful women and two OK-looking dudes and also Mike Vogel who is kind of absurdly dreamy) including Lizzy Caplan, Actual Famous Person. The plot (Spoilers! Better late than never!) also kind of glides over the fact that the entire population of Manhattan gets evacuated in about six hours, and the final few minutes all take place after a helicopter crash which probably should have killed every passenger yet somehow did not. Not to mention the entire found-footage premise hinges on one character, Hud, never losing and almost never putting down or turning off the camcorder despite running for his life for six solid hours. The whole movie is wall-to-wall crazy-go-nuts, and to truly enjoy it you have to surrender any and all expectations that it’s going to present a sequence of events that make you go “Hmm, yeah, I can see how that could really happen.” And frankly, if you buy every other logistical unlikelihood in the film but reject the crazy rampaging critter at the center, I don’t even know how to approach getting you to re-evaluate your take.
My point is, the logical improbabilities in the plot are just as irrelevant as the fact that Rob’s camcorder, as wielded by Hud, has Hollywood-worthy sound and image quality. Nothing in the movie is realistic, and the whole thing is in fact a fantasy which just happens to employ found-footage as a structural template. Accept that, and you can bask in the many awesome positives Cloverfield has going for it:
1. Hud. Quite possibly the Sensational Character Find of 2008. Most found-footage horror movies tend to justify the camera continuing to roll because the character responsible for it is extremely stubborn, or arrogant, or some combination. Hud is just sweet and funny and a little bit dumb. He spends the vast majority of the movie behind the lens, always out of sight (with a couple of perfectly-deployed exceptions) and often offering stream-of-consciousness commentary, and is a perfect audience surrogate while still developing an indelible identity of his own.
2. Marlena. The aforementioned Lizzy Caplan kills it as the archetypal sarcastic tough girl, and quite possibly her greatest moment comes and goes in a fraction of a second, when Hud is talking about how freaked out he is and how much more freaked out he could be, and everyone else tells him to shut up already, and Marlena just looks at the camera and smiles a little, trying not to laugh, not wanting to encourage Hud either but at least recognizing the value of a little gallows humor. It also seems to hint that maybe Hud’s fawning romantic interest in Marlena won’t end up being entirely one-way. (Except of course they both die, because it’s a horror movie. Oh well.)
3. The flashback structure. How can you possibly have anything other than linear narrative structure in a found-footage movie without cheating the premise? By having the premise involve Rob’s well-meaning slacker brother borrowing Rob’s own videocamera to record testimonials at Rob’s going away party, without realizing that the tape loaded in the camera already had something recorded on it, which is being taped over. Every time someone actually does turn off the camera, there’s the potential for some of the original recording (all of which has to do with the romance between Rob and Beth) to peek through the latter one. Yes, camcorders don’t necessarily work like that with the tape advancing while you’re not recording, and yes it’s beyond unlikely that the two recordings would sync up in the gaps with such illuminating precision. Everything in the movie is carefully constructed (seriously, were you not paying attention above when I was going on and on about suspension of disbelief?) for maximum effect. But I give full credit for the cleverness of the construction and the storytelling opportunities it provides. Maybe I’m easily impressed, I’ve copped to that before, but there you go.
4. The action. It has been a long time since a movie literally made my heart pound, but there were multiple times in Cloverfield where my physiological reactions were pretty extreme. Again, I just think it’s impressive as hell the way they shot the movie, so that it can fool your brain into thinking that you really are watching someone run away from monsters while holding a camcorder up to their eye, while at the same time keeping the shots just stable and in-focus enough that it doesn’t disorient or induce seasickness or whathaveyou. I know, in my rational brain, that it’s 100% manipulation of image and sound and pushing primitive buttons in my brain, but knowing that did not stop it from working in the slightest.
There’s one more itemized bit of awesome I’ll get to below, but before I do I wanted to address something broader about the horror genre. I wrote last month about how I believed that adolescent geeks were drawn to horror movies as tests of manhood and proof of prowess and so forth. I still stand by that, but I realized later that I should have acknowledged that explanation only applies to certain kinds of adolescent geeks: those who, like me and my middle-school friends, may not have been popular but at least had a workable circle of friends and social skills for interacting with them and so on. Those kinds of geeks have certain basic self-actualization needs already met and can reach upwards to others as I described. But there is also a certain kind of adolescent geek who doesn’t have any friends (and we could debate almost endlessly the chicken/egg nature of that, whether their peers reject them because they lack social skills or they lack social skills because they’ve been peremptorily rejected) and becomes anti-social and is drawn to horror movies because they root for the serial killer and enjoy seeing the quarterback and the head cheerleader get decapitated. And for them, watching a horror movie isn’t a feat of internal fortitude, it’s just a twisted pleasure.
I bring this up not only to defend myself against changes of being completely naïve (though that’s part of it) but continue praising Cloverfield and specifically why it worked for me. I don’t root for the monsters in horror movies, I root for the potential survivors (who are more often than not likely victims). So of course when the intensity of a particular setpiece puts the main characters in peril, my pulse quickens exponentially. I’m invested. And I think it’s very much to Cloverfield’s credit that it starts with a very slow build to introduce the characters, all of whom are essentially likable in one way or another. It’s a little bit brilliant to combine good-looking folks out of central casting with a well-written script that defines everyone’s best qualities early and often and shoot it in a faux-found-footage style that makes everyone seem very accessible, as if you’re right there at the party with them, and THEN drop them into a total nightmare as the city gets annihilated. It’s entirely possible this is why reactions to the movie were so mixed, because some people expected a standard horror movie, and all the misanthropic baggage that goes along with it, and instead they got something that insists you care about the people about to be terrified and dispatched. But I was into it.
Plus, that first-person helicopter crash? I (like many people) have nightmares about falling, and that sequence was like something pulled shrieking out of my own head.
5. The ending. Not only is Cloverfield not inherently misanthropic, it’s actually a love story about Rob and Beth, and a life-affirming one at that, despite some tragic appearances. The major imperative of the plot is that Beth is trapped in her collapsing apartment building as soon as the monster attacks, and Rob spends the movie trying to get to her and then get her safely out of the city. He does get to her, he does get a triumphant kiss with her at the chopper evac site, and then the aforementioned crash and pure abject terror just before the entire city is carpetbombed by the military, presumably killing them both. When the bombs fall, the camcorder stops taping, which conveniently happens about a minute before the end of the tape.
So the last minute is footage of Rob and Beth at the end of a Coney Island excursion, saying goodbye to the camera. And when Rob asks Beth for some parting words, she sighs contentedly and says, “I had a good day.” The Poignant End! Perhaps you are inclined to think that two people who never really got a chance to be together in love and died young (and in extreme pain and terror) are the stuff of straight-up tragedy alone. But I see it differently. We all have to die someday. Preferably in our sleep when we’re ninety-something, but you can’t live your life thinking about (or trying with all your might to control) how you’re going to die. If anything, you should spend your life trying to have good days. And if you can look back on even one day and declare it wholly and satisfyingly good, you’ve done all right. It’s not exactly cheating death, but it’s what I hold on to.
My wife is not into horror movies at all and I’ve never tried to inflict them on her, but after I saw Cloverfield I had to at least tell her about it, not just that I really loved it and was thrilled by it, but most of the stuff I’ve posted here. I figured it was the least I could do so as not to leave her wondering why I was so overcome with the need to declare repeatedly that I loved her and she had given me so many good days that if I got caught between an airstrike and a murderous goliath salamander I would have no regrets. I’m exceedingly lucky that she was able to see that as sweet and not deranged (or, at least, as a weighted-in-the-right-direction combination of both).
No comments:
Post a Comment