31 MORE Days, 31 MORE Screams: Day 22 (Cloverfield)

ROAR-- wait are you filming me? Turn it off, turn
the goddamn camera off--

Here and now, 22 days into this big old extensive project, we're hitting a sort of strange intersection. By chance and happenstance we have gone from metafiction, to found footage, to found footage/monster movie. Where we are now is crossing over with where we were about two weeks prior. We were looking at the original Godzilla back then, and then Godzilla 1984. Both very good in their own rights and both big monster movies with a certain sort of ethos to them. Beyond the spectacle of a big lizard smashing buildings and making shit blow up, I mean. 2008's Cloverfield is a different sort of beast, in what feels like a strange mashup of something like The Blair Witch Project and something like Godzilla. It's also got the stamp of JJ Abrams on it, which would have me raise an eyebrow given how I feel about his involvement with Star Trek and Star Wars. He gets off the hook for now... mostly. What does a fusion of Godzilla and Blair Witch even look like? Let's find out, together.


Blair Witch, but with more explosions. Okay, not really. Since Blair Witch is the only other big found footage thing we've done, there's going to be a fair bit of comparison between it and Cloverfield. Nothing against one or the other, just a difference of technique and time. Our POV mostly stays with one guy, much like Heather in Blair Witch. Hud (oh my good god are you serious) is kind of... That Guy. You know That Guy, in the movies. The typical annoying type who doesn't realize he's being annoying or inappropriate. That Guy. I have fucking waking nightmares about becoming That Guy, and Hud going around telling everyone about his two pals sleeping together at the party is physically painful to me. Thank goodness for explosions and screaming and the goddamned head of the Statue of Liberty flying onto the street. You get some glimpses of whatever in the holy fuck is doing all this before a building collapses and everyone goes to hide. Now, Godzilla definitely had that whole anti-nuclear message to it and it was pretty explicit. Cloverfield is lacking in any sort of ethos, just being a found footage movie about a monster that fucks up New York. You could give a surface reading of it being to 9/11 what Godzilla was to the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings, but there's really not too much to work with. Beyond it specifically being New York City getting fucked up and lots of injured people showing the human tragedy of this calamity, you don't get too much of a sense of anything else. It does manage to show the human cost of the tragedy as people in the group get killed and are mourned, with the entire mission being everyone's pal Rob wanting to get into the city to save the girl he likes from her apartment. All along the way we get lots more glimpses of the monster, and even some gnarly shit involving smaller monsters who bite you and make you explode. Not sure what the fuck is up with that, but the one girl who explodes from a monster bite was the one thing I could remember of this film before rewatching it tonight.


Now, found footage has to have its own justification for pointing a camera at scary shit and continuing to shoot despite the obvious life-threatening terror on the go. Hud's reason for continuing to shoot is to document the attack and what happened to New York. Plausible enough as far as motivations go. There's even some fun camera tricks, like not revaling those smaller monsters until someone turns on the night vision mode for Hud. Of course, everything goes to shit and we have a staredown with the monster until it eats Hud, and then Rob takes over for a bit and everything explodes. The end. On the whole, I like Cloverfield. It's interesting enough and the misery porn aspect of Blair Witch is lessened by this being a movie with a big monster and explosions. Bless its heart, on some level it is trying to be Godzilla from the perspective of the little people caught in the wake of destruction... but Godzilla was never just about the destruction. Even poor JJ Abrams, if Wikipedia is to be believed, got the idea seeds for this by seeing Godzilla toys in Japan and thinking that America needed its own monster. JJ. No. The takeaway from Godzilla should not be "WE NEED OUR OWN BIG SMASHY BUILDING MAN!". On some level, history agrees; the Cloverfield monster is not an icon of kaiju cinema like Godzilla or King Kong. It's just a big grey spider-thing that smashed New York City while people filmed it and ran away. At the same time, this movie's good. It may be lacking in implicit themes, but it's still short and breezy and not completely miserable so something was done right with it. I first saw it via a shitty camrip online, and that just might be the perfect way to have seen it; obfuscating the film with another layer of filtered reality. Totally like, a filtered reality, man.