Cloverfield - From Spring 2008

 Cloverfield – Spring 2008

Review originally published in SBU's The Statesman

(This review has been updated with better grammar from the originally published version. Significant changes are noted with strikethroughs and/or asterisks. Updated and additional notes are further below.)

"This movie is AWESOME! You must see it in the theater. It is not a typical January release because most action films are reserved for summer, but even 5 months from now, nothing could compare to the excitement Cloverfield gives you. You will stay on the edge of your seat for its entirety.

Cloverfield was a team effort: J.J. Abrams, Matt Reeves, and Drew Goddard are connected by their work on Lost, Alias, and *...Felicity? (I should have originally phrased it this way for better effect.) Like these three TV shows the This movie has a mysterious monster, takes place on an island, is in an urban environment, features a capable relatively unknown inexpensive cast of actors, a mission, and relationships that push the plot forward to keep the audience's interest. "The tape you are about to watch was found in an area 'formerly known as Central Park'." You can already imagine the ending so it's about how it got to Central Park that matters.

Rob has gotten a promotion that requires him to move to Japan. The characters' relationships are revealed as Hud captures testimonials wishing Rob luck at his good-bye party. Suddenly there is a citywide blackout and presumed earthquake. The guests go to the roof for a better look when a skyscraper is destroyed and the debris cloud comes down as something screams.

The group of friends goes to the street and comes within a few feet away of the Statue of Liberty's head rolling over by them. What follows is complete panic, destruction and military action. Rob gets a call from Beth and decides to go rescue her at her midtown apartment. Lily, Marlena, and Hud accompany him against better judgement because they have nothing left to lose. Their journey lasts through the night to the next morning.

What slightly ruins the story's plausibility are Lily and Marlena not caring they have been running for hours in heels and a girl so badly hurt she should be dead but instead has enough adrenaline to keep going (*as these tropes require). However, they are minor issues relative to Cloverfield being a new beloved film. It adheres to the disaster formula (*which I wrote a paper about a semester earlier and coming to you here next!) but has just enough changes to differentiate it. It is no surprise that the military's only defenses against the monster are bombs and other nuclear weapons. The writers chose this method not because of a lack of creativity, but because of what the government is prone to do in threatening situations. There is no musical score or soundtrack except for a few party songs at the beginning, the monster's constant screams and the sounds of the military's weapons exploding. 

Cloverfield can satisfy anyone not prone to motion sickness. There is pathos for the characters (despite how idiotic their mission to save a damsel-in-distress is), racing heartbeat action with just enough minutes to catch your breath, the destruction of New York City (featured in almost all disaster films), a monster you don't get a close clear shot of until the end and a great ending that wraps up everything. 

As said before and must be said again, this movie is AWESOME!

Updates from 2021:

In the original The Statesman publication, my thumbs-up review was juxtaposed next to a fellow critic's thumbs-down review with the page's commence-battle line, "Cloverfield: A box office hit or a filming disaster". Given that in the 13 years since, this film has been considered a cult-classic favorite with two quote-on-quote sequels, I totally won that argument!

At the time of release, the shaky-cam, found-footage genre was still seen in many of its contemporaries no thanks in part due to that it was only 9 years since Blair Witch premiered, 7 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and 5 years since the 2003 eastern seaboard blackout. But the Bad Robot team pushed that style along with its guilty-by-association tropes by giving audiences a story with dialed-up intensity yet kept the monstrous disaster an intimate experience for the core characters instead of in an Armageddon, Deep Impact, or even The Day After Tomorrow kind of world doomsday extravaganza.

To be honest, I love a movie that kills its main characters. Only a handful of projects are willing to take that risk. Here, Drew Goddard, Matt Reeves, J.J. Abrams and the other producers went for it and made it work. The risk is loosing the opportunity to continue on in sequels because otherwise there needs to be a creative worthy spin-off or even more risky, a prequel. But, they found a way. And by "they" I mean Dan Trachtenberg, Josh Campbell, Matthew Stuecken, and Damien Chazelle who are behind 10 Cloverfield Lane...and then Oren Uziel, Doug Jung, and Julius Onah behind The Cloverfield Paradox. Instead of bringing the OG characters back or featuring the same monster, the Cloverfield worlds are (pretty-much supposed to be) each their own. 

Looking at the cast list for Cloverfield, I totally forgot that both Mike Vogel and Michael Stahl-David were in the film playing brothers and are not the same person as Rob. Like, I know they are different actors I've appreciated in their own projects, but when I recently spoke to a friend about meeting Mike Vogel after an event, it was actually Michael Stahl-David that I met. I had his face in my memory but said Mike Vogel's name. Which goes to show that the Casting Director Alyssa Weisberg got her assignment correct and I couldn't differentiate in the moment. (Michael Stahl-David, thanks for being so kind when I completely fumbled over my words trying to tell you my SAG-AFTRA email address after a screening of The Light of the Moon. It was a long week at the office and I didn't have my business cards yet, plus I'd just seen you naked in the movie.) As for the other actors, Lizzy Caplan, T.J. Miller, Jessica Lucas, Odette Annabelle, Ben Feldman, Theo Rossi, Kelvin Yu, and even other one-liner principals have also had super successful careers since. 

Their relatively known but non-celebrity faces made the film's marketing campaign especially more realistic. As per this article on CinemaBlend by Mike Reyes in 2018, each of the main characters had their own MySpace pages with last login info for potential audiences to find in advance of the January release. 

After Cloverfield, Drew Goddard went on to write the incredibly fun and even more unique monster movie The Cabin in the Woods. But I have a particular bone to pick, or rather pound of flesh to bite for his terrible adaptation of Max Brooks' capital L-Literature of World War Z - a review which I will feature when I (eventually!) get to my HubPages reviews' republishing.

I'm torn about Matt Reeves. His writing for NBC's Ordinary Joe series has some lackluster simplicity but he's an Executive Producer on 2020's perfectly beautiful Tales From The Loop. And people are really excited for his upcoming The Batman with Robert Pattinson.

Cloverfield is kind of in the middle of what's come before it and what's come after it. Influences on the film seem to be built upon the 20th century Godzilla movies, South Korea's 2006 sleeper-hit The Host.  As for Cloverfield's influence, its DNA is at the heart of the such small and big films with the mysterious and dangerous behemoths like Monsters (2010), Pacific Rim (2013), and even A Quiet Place (2018). 

This film's drop in January 2008 was the first AWESOME title that would come to yield an impressive year of American movie releases that have withstood the test of time, effectively starting the tentpole era: Iron Man, The Dark Knight, Twilight, and more to-be-cable-repeat favorites.