Up next is another monster movie that ratchets up the scale—it’s also one that still remains somewhat unique. Where Godzillas or Jurassic Parks made sure to show off their toothy towering creations, here’s one that takes the action as raw as you can in such a genre piece—15 years on, here’s my look at Cloverfield.
Directed by Matt Reeves and produced by JJ Abrams, Cloverfield’s marketing is memorable for all the patented Abrams mystery stuff—no trailer revealed what the monster looked like, and that lead to speculation aplenty. Still, the aim was to take a kaiju film and make it one for the current generation of the post 9/11 century—with the film very much leaning into that unfortunate zeitgeist. For those now too young to remember, I will say it does actually somewhat capture all the confusion and turmoil back then.
And what its selling point in that regard was happened to something also very much borne of the 21st century—disasters caught on the ground, by camcorder or anything else you can hold in your hand. Found footage, basically—something very much abused by low-budget productions to find excuses for shaky camerawork, but here, there was some justification. We had seen how events could be captured on the ground by any citizen, and now we had an opportunity to give a well-worn staple a new perspective in every sense of the word.
Most of the cast of course were young unknowns—Lizzy Caplan, TJ Miller, Michael Stahl-David, and Jessica Lucas making up our yuppie leads. As documented on ‘recovered footage’ through the film, we start off at a leaving party in Manhattan that soon gets hit with some of the usual boyfriend-girlfriend drama—soon interrupted by the power going out, and then someone or something tossing the Statue of Liberty’s head down the street. And it all goes downhill from there.
As far as found footage goes, Cloverfield’s not a bad example—sure there’s the usual jitteriness that you have to take or leave, but there’s a good effort in giving us a sense of scale (sometimes we glimpse TV screens giving us flashes of something massive moving between skyscrapers). The pace is brisk, and the environments change quickly from streets to bridges to tunnels. And throughout, we have a constant sense of the situation worsening—the military has to keep escalating its efforts to stop the monster, going from soldiers and tanks to jets and bombers, and eventually the one final countermeasure. It soon transpires that the monster is shedding parasites that spread disease, making things only more complicated for our leads as they try to rescue a loved one trapped in the city.
Some people wondered why they were so hellbent on this—well, as more recent events have definitively shown, it’s not like it’s a given that people will act perfectly logical in a crisis, isn’t it?
And the monster itself? It’s certainly a memorable critter, and seemed to greatly influence the design of many a kaiju in years to come, from Pacific Rim to the Godzilla reboot itself, with its elongated forelimbs. An interesting take is that it’s supposedly just a confused child stumbling around an unfamiliar environment looking for a parent—not something bought up in the film itself, but definitely a notion to stir the imagination.
Enjoying the film depends on how you feel about the presentation—the characters aren’t anything to write home about, and while I didn’t mind them, some seemingly did. The rest I feel still holds up decently, with there being some nicely memorable shots and a few bloodcurdling moments as things go on.
There were followups, of a sort, seemingly forming an anthology series of sort—10 Cloverfield Lane was a very different sort of film, but did have some of the same themes of isolated characters in mysterious danger. I certainly liked it, even if the ending felt a bit confused. Netflix eventually gave us Cloverfield Paradox…which unfortunately strayed from the anthology feel as a weird and even more confused mishmash, which to be honest I don’t recommend at all.
That takes care of our giant monster quota—up next we scale things down, with something no less memorable…
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