J.J. Abrams has been a major force in TV and movies for 10 years now, but even with three hit series to his credit (Felicity, Alias, and Lost) and a hit movie (Mission: Impossible 3), I still can’t decide if he’s a genius or a charlatan. He’s amazingly good at arranging familiar pop-culture tropes—desert-island castaways, international superspies—into fresh new patterns, and amazingly bad at carrying those ideas across the finish line. Take Lost, for instance: it’s a show that, during its dazzling first season and a half, seemed to contain metaphors for practically everything, but which now seems so tangled up in subplots and arbitrary “mysteries” that it no longer seems like it’s ever going to amount to anything.Abrams didn’t write or direct Cloverfield (like last year’s “Judd Apatow comedy” Superbad, it’s a movie people attribute to its superstar producer instead of the people who actually created it)—but the writer, Drew Goddard, and the director, Matt Reeves, have both worked extensively on Abrams’ TV shows, and Cloverfield has all the hallmarks of the Abrams brand.
The young, no-name cast—all of them TV-trained, albeit not on shows you probably watched—is ridiculously good-looking, even by Hollywood standards. The characters live in places that are ridiculously expensive but still youthful and “funky”—the kind of New York loft a hip 25-year-old lawyer would live in if he were making the salary of a successful 60-year-old lawyer. The premise—a monster movie about a giant creature attacking New York filmed from the point of view of a single digital camera—is smart, snappy, and was probably a breeze to pitch to the studios. Like all of Abrams’ projects, it’s highly commercial but with enough of a twist to make you think, “Now that could be interesting.”
And for the first 45 minutes or so, Cloverfield is very interesting indeed. We start out at the going-away party for Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David), who is set to take on a vice-president position at his company’s office in Japan. As his friend Hud (T.J. Miller) circulates around the party with a digital camera, collecting farewell messages for Rob, we learn that a romance has quietly arisen between Rob and a girl named Beth (Odette Yustman), who is devastated at the prospect of him leaving the country. But this soap opera is interrupted by a gigantic tremor that shakes the building and temporarily knocks out the power. When the guests climb up to the roof to see what’s happening, they see a hail of fire raining down around them—and then the head of the Statue of Liberty flying through the air and landing on the street.
This section of the film shamelessly but effectively invokes the imagery of 9/11: buildings collapsing, crowds clogging the Brooklyn Bridge, people covered in ash staggering along the sidewalk, normal, everyday life joltingly interrupted. And by only giving us the information that Hud gets through his camera lens, Reeves shrewdly captures the mood of 9/11 too: the panic of knowing something cataclysmic has happened but being unable to tell exactly what it is, or where to go that will be safe. (Disaster movies, 9/11, photography—Cloverfield is a checklist of Susan Sontag’s favourite themes.)
It turns out that some kind of giant creature—less a Godzilla-style lizard than a humongous orc—is on the loose. And it’s somewhere around here, as Rob and a handful of surviving partygoers try to get across Manhattan to rescue Beth, who’s trapped under a collapsed wall in her apartment, that the movie gets less interesting. It becomes clear that the filmmakers don’t have much interest in developing their 9/11 allegory and the film turns into nothing more ambitious than an escape-the-monster amusement park ride.
And I think Cloverfield works on that rock-’em-sock-’em level. There are some genuine jolts here, the combination of CGI monsters and handheld camerawork is seamless, and the youthful filmmakers demonstrate an effortless, playful familiarity with the grammar of digital video that the older Brian De Palma couldn’t quite pull off in Redacted. For instance, when Hud occasionally stops filming, we get glimpses of the footage he’s taping over: home movies taken weeks earlier of Rob and Beth during happier times, when they weren’t running for their lives.
If only these moments were more resonant or poetic, and the two characters weren’t such blandly attractive nothings! And if only the movie didn’t build to such an anticlimax! Cloverfield is ample proof that J.J. Abrams knows how to tickle the public’s imagination; but he still hasn’t quite figured out how to haunt our dreams.
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