Sometimes as a reviewer you think about how great it would be to able to unleash your inner geek and just gush in a similar fashion to unabashed fanbot and rotund man Harry Knowles. After all, he’s made a living out of it! In any case, sometimes you put aside your critical faculties and remember that cinema at its best is often about pure entertainment. Enter Cloverfield, the most mercilessly hyped, secrecy-cloaked, genre busting monster movie since some other movie about destroying major landmarks. Or something. Whatever – this film absolutely lives up to the hype, in the way that we all hope the final episode of Lost will (or mark my words: heads will roll. Either that, or the internet will spontaneously combust.)
What a neat segue! Producer and Lost co-creator JJ Abrams (for anyone interested, Cloverfield’s director is Matt Reeves, and it was written by Drew Goddard – of Angel, Alias and Buffy fame) really knows how to crank our anxieties to unbearable levels. There’s every kind of anxiety ticked off here you could imagine to endure: claustrophobic anxiety, collapsed super-structures anxiety, separated from love of one’s life anxiety, aircraft disaster anxiety, exploding from the inside out with rivers of blood anxiety, horrid giant insects anxiety, and of course, it-came-from-another-place, seriously huge and bent on destruction monster anxiety.
Yes – the monster. Is it the monster from Lost? Who cares! Focus! We see it almost immediately (taking a leaf from The Host’s hugely successful book), and thus the action – which is “white knuckle”, to use a great action movie cliché for good reason – can begin in earnest and cease to relent for the next 60 minutes. Shot on good looking handheld cameras, the through line in Cloverfield is of the classic race against time variety. Our heroes set out as a pack from a party rudely interrupted by the unfettered destruction of Manhattan, and we know they will each meet suitably awful ends by the time the credits roll. And by “awful”, I mean “bone-crushingly disgusting”.
Cloverfield is incredibly clever. It uses very few locations and little known actors to achieve its eerily intense and somewhat familiar (hi 9/11 survivors) realism. And though the dialogue is occasionally ham-fisted, the obvious humour (which could be lifted straight from Buffy – something which will endlessly please all those weirdos who loved that show) works very effectively to alleviate the tension right before something truly horrifying happens. Again. I screamed, clutched my head repeatedly, peered through my fingers, nearly got vertigo from one particularly memorable scene and dug appropriately impressive holes into the burly arm of my date. In short, it was a bit like being on a rollercoaster – thrilling and totally awesome fun, dude. THIS MOVIE FUCKING KILLED, MAN. If I’d paid to see it, I would feel immensely satisfied. And that’s something which doesn’t happen all that often any more.
Watch the trailer
