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Review: Cloverfield (2008)

Cloverfield (2008)

Rated PG-13 for violence, terror and disturbing images

Score: 4 out of 5

Sixteen years after it premiered, to the month and almost to the day, I decided to rewatch Cloverfield in a very different context to that in which I first saw it. When it premiered, it did so at the climax of a hype campaign in which the spectacular and chaotic first trailer, attached to the 2007 Transformers movie, didn't even reveal the film's title, just a release date and the fact that J. J. Abrams was producing it. Six months of speculation, fueled by a complex alternate reality game filled with Easter eggs, clues, and a backstory involving a Japanese corporation's deep-sea drilling activities, left audiences buzzing as to what it might be about. People speculated that it was a new American Godzilla remake, a Voltron adaptation, a spinoff of Abrams' hit sci-fi show Lost, or even an H. P. Lovecraft adaptation. The first one turned out to be the closest to the truth, in that, while it didn't feature the Big G himself, it was still a kaiju movie cut from a very similar cloth, one that used the idea of a giant monster attacking a city to comment on a recent tragedy in a manner I've always found fascinating long after I saw it. It was a hit, big enough to spawn two spinoffs (one of which was a good movie in its own right, the other... not so much), and people still talk about doing a proper sequel to this day.

All of that, of course, was peripheral to the film itself. Watching it again in 2024, I had only vague memories of its viral marketing campaign, most of which was hosted on long-forgotten websites (some of which are now defunct) and very little of which is actually referenced in the movie unless you know what you're looking for. The question of whether or not the movie actually held up on its own merits as a movie was the important one this time, not whether it answered questions about the Tagruato corporation or what's really in the Slusho! beverages they sell. And honestly, if it wasn't a good movie all along, even without Abrams' "mystery box" marketing, I don't think we'd still be talking about it today. Make no mistake, there are elements that don't hold up today, especially the slow first twenty minutes and anything involving T. J. Miller's character, and not just because of his real-life scandals. But those are mostly fluff on an otherwise very well-made film, one that takes a monster movie and puts viewers in the shoes of the people on the ground running like hell from the monster. Much as the original 1954 Godzilla movie was the kind of movie that could only have been made by Japanese filmmakers after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this is the kind of movie that could only have been made by American filmmakers after 9/11, one that lifts a lot of its visual shorthand from the attacks to depict a kaiju rampage as 9/11 on steroids. It's a movie that starts slow but immediately starts ratcheting up the tension once the mayhem starts and only rarely lets up, one whose special effects and thrills are still spectacular years later despite a fairly low budget. In the pantheon of kaiju movies, Cloverfield still holds up as not only one of the best made outside Japan, but one that matches and rivals some of its inspirations.

The initial hook of this movie is that it's a found-footage take on Godzilla, one where a giant monster attack is shown from street-level through the eyes, and specifically the video camera, of somebody running for his life. Here, that person is Hud Platt, a guy whose first name (as in, "heads-up display") says it all: he's less a character than he is the viewer's avatar filming the real main characters. Those guys are the brothers Rob and Jason Hawkins who Hud is friends with, Jason's fiancé Lily Ford, Rob's estranged girlfriend Beth McIntyre, and Marlena Diamond, an actress who Hud has a crush on. The film starts with all of them at a going-away party at Rob's apartment in Manhattan to celebrate Rob getting a promotion that will see him move to Japan, one where Rob and Beth's relationship drama threatens to ruin it before something far bigger comes along to do that: a sudden earthquake, followed by an explosion in Lower Manhattan caused by something that's come ashore from the ocean and is big enough to throw the head of the Statue of Liberty roughly a mile. As the city plunges into chaos, Rob, his life shattered, vows to do the one thing he possibly can for himself: find Beth.

The first twenty minutes at times were largely an exercise in watching a group of rich twentysomethings talk and argue about their frivolous issues. In the context of the broader film, especially with its many, many 9/11 allusions and how it developed these characters later on, it worked to set the mood, that these were not heroes but a group of ordinary people whose lives are suddenly upended by tragedy and horror. As I was watching those first twenty minutes, however, I came to find the characters grating, not least of all Hud. He's your stock 2000s bro-comedy goofball and the film's main source of comic relief, and I quickly grew to despise him. A lot of the first act is built around his awkward attempts to hit on Marlena and his spreading stories to the rest of the party about Rob and Beth's sex life, the latter of which causes no shortage of problems. The other characters all get room to grow as the film goes on, but Hud remains the same obnoxious dick that he was in the beginning, such that some of my favorite moments in the film were when the other characters told him to cool it after his jokes got too much even for them. T. J. Miller may have been playing exactly the character he was told to, and he may have done it well, but the film as a whole didn't need an annoying asshole as the cameraman constantly interjecting. Hud should've been somebody who gets killed off to raise the stakes, let us know that things are serious, and give us a bit of catharsis after all the problems he caused for Rob at the beginning of the film, while the camera is instead carried by either a flat non-entity who doesn't act so annoying or one of the other characters.

(If I may indulge in fanfic for a bit here, there's a version of this movie in my head where Marlena, the outsider to the main friend group, serves as the camerawoman and basically swaps roles with Hud. What's more, she would have had her own secrets that would've tied into the ARG viral marketing, creating an aura of mystery around her and the sense that she can't be trusted -- and since she's the one with the camera, the question of whether or not we're dealing with an unreliable narrator would've come up. Even without that subplot, though, I still think she would've made a better cameraperson than Hud, if only because she was less annoying.)

Once the monster attack begins, however, everything not involving Hud is gold. The actual monster is a beast, and while the film loves to keep it in the dark for long stretches, its presence is never not felt once it shows up. The 2014 American Godzilla remake tried to do something similar in showing us its monsters only sparingly, but there's a difference between having their presence felt even when they're not actually on screen and having them appear so little that you start to forget you're watching a Godzilla movie. Here, while most scenes, especially early on, give us only brief glimpses of "Clover" (as the production team called the monster) as it hides amidst New York's skyscrapers, the viewers, by way of the characters and their video camera, are never not in a situation where they can't notice its presence, whether they're escaping from plumes of smoke and debris when it topples the Woolworth Building, scrambling to get off the Brooklyn Bridge before it tears it in half, hiding in the subways and encountering its nasty offspring, crawling through a skyscraper that it's partly toppled over onto another one, or wandering through trashed city streets and hastily-constructed emergency service tents in scenes lifted straight out of post-9/11 news reports from Lower Manhattan. Reeves shot the action incredibly well, in a way that constantly had me on the edge of my seat afraid for the main characters' lives and, because the found-footage perspective put me right in there with them, even my own life for a bit. (The recent Japanese Godzilla movies definitely feel influenced by this film in how they approach showing the monster from a street-level perspective.) The shaky cam may have become a meme after the movie came out, but it's actually not nearly as bad as its reputation suggests, used in exactly the right ways with the film knowing when to have the camera held steady to give us a good look and when to use it to convey the panic that the main characters are facing. The look for the monster that Reeves and the film's effects team came up with is also a unique and creative one, especially once we finally see it in full view, in all its glory, towards the end. When we see the military fight Clover, it feels like a struggle that they're losing, and I completely bought that this thing was able to stomp them the way it did. This is a disaster movie played not as an action flick, but as a horror movie, and it's an approach I'm surprised more disaster movies haven't taken.

The cast was comprised largely of unknowns and TV actors, quite a few of whom have gone on to bigger and better things since, and I'm not surprised given how good they were. Michael Stahl-David was the centerpiece as Rob, a man whose seemingly stupid decision to go back into the city starts to make a surprising amount of sense once you see the grief that's come over him over everything he's lost by the end of the first act of the movie. He's a man whose old concerns with work and moving now seem like nothing in the face of an eldritch abomination like Clover that took almost everything from him, and who now only cares about making things right with Beth, the love of his life, the one thing he has left. He's almost a Lovecraftian protagonist, somebody who loses it in the face of unspeakable horrors from beyond, albeit one whose spiral into madness is less overt than you normally see in explicitly Lovecraftian works. Jessica Lucas, Mike Vogel, Lizzy Caplan, and Odette Annable (credited here by her maiden name Odette Yustman) all made for good sidekicks to Rob as Lily, Jason, Marlena, and Beth, all of them scared out of their minds as they're trapped on an island with a monster and nowhere to run, even if I thought that Caplan unfortunately got short shrift in the film despite having a bit more depth to her character than she let on. (See: my proposed story idea above.) This was the kind of monster movie that needed interesting, well-rounded, and well-acted human characters to anchor it, and it had them in spades.

The Bottom Line

Cloverfield wasn't just a fluke of viral marketing, but a legitimately outstanding monster movie even on its own merits, one that knows when to cultivate a veil of mystery and when to drop that veil and let loose with an all-American take on classic kaiju mayhem. Even sixteen years, two excellent Japanese Godzilla movies, and one MonsterVerse later, it still holds up.

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