WARNING: CLOVERFIELD SPOILERS BELOW AND IN COMMENTS. READ AT YOUR OWN CLOVERISK.
I adored it. Absolutely adored it. You know, it’s one of those things where you can hear the arguments “against” coming from a mile away, and thought you can’t really refute them, you just don’t care. An opinion is just that, and I say with all sincerity that Cloverfield is one of my favorite films in a long, long time, and among my favorite moviegoing experiences ever.
I could’ve given you this review last Tuesday, as I was fortunate enough to see an early press screening. I just really wanted to see it again before saying anything, because I went into that first viewing with sky-high expectations set from months of crazy hype, and because, frankly, seeing a movie like this in a relatively stuffy “press screening atmosphere” robbed it of some of its punch. Yesterday, I saw it with regular folks and without those prayers for the impossible created by months of daydreaming, and Christ, this may be the first movie since Burton’s Batman that I see more than twice in theaters.
Is it a perfect movie? Fuck no. It’s not even a revolutionary experience in the same way The Blair Witch Project was. But it’s damn effective: It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s scary, it’s brutal, it’s big, and it’s a bona fide experience. I think you’d have to go into this with an extremely contrary-prone mind to not at least leave feeling like you just experienced something. You can’t just “watch” Cloverfield.
What surprised me is how I liked it for entirely different reasons than I expected. I didn’t expect to really care about the characters as anything more than devices, but here I am, ready to proclaim Hud and Marlena as two of my favorite movie characters ever. And I can’t even explain why. I really can’t. But something about both of those characters makes me know that I’m going to be forever loyal to the actors that played them, even if the remainder of their careers are filled with bad choices and awful roles. I’ll forever root for them.
Course, Cloverfield is going to be weighed by the effectiveness of the monster and the destruction said monster caused. Overall, I was totally impressed by the creature. I’m one of the many thousands of fans who spent months trying to come up with a rough estimation of what the monster was going to look like, and it was absolutely 100% different from any of the popular theories. Truth be told, it’s nearly impossible to describe what you saw without the aid of photos. (Photos and clips have already made their way online, but I don’t want to be that kind of spoiler guy.)
The best monster scenes are the ones where we don’t get an amazingly clear view of it, and fortunately, those account for all but one of the creature’s appearances. When they finally make good on their vow to show it clearly near the end of the film, you can sense that they’re doing it begrudgingly: It looks cool and badass, but the overall effect is nothing compared to earlier shots of the semi-obscured beast lumbering around/past/straight through buildings. During the scene where our heroes have to cross roofs between damaged skyscrapers, Hud points the camera down the long avenue, and we see the monster more or less in full, plodding down the streets as jets bomb it to all fuck. The shot was just gorgeous. Not like I wasn’t going to anyway, but I’d totally get the DVD just for the opportunity to screencap that shot and make it my desktop wallpaper for the next year.
As for the mini-monsters (the “parasites” that drop off the big guy), viewer opinion seems to be split. I’d agree that the spider-like things could’ve stood to be a bit less derivative of some of wacky creatures we’ve already seen in other movies and video games, but then, we don’t know the whole story. It could be that they’re totally natural sea parasites mutated by drawing blood from this possibly-alien creature, and that’s a fucking awesome concept. The beauty about Cloverfield even at this late stage is that so much stuff is left wide open for interpretation. I know that a lot of people wish they were given more solid answers, but I’m so glad we weren’t. When you know all there is to know, there isn’t much left to think about. Right now, there is, and this film’s lore is a heck of a lot of fun to think about.
I got off-track: The mini-monsters were a welcome addition. As insane as the main creature was, New York City is a big place: A second threat that could turn up anywhere was almost a necessity. The smaller creatures may have seemed more pestilent than horrific, but considering that their bites cause people to explode, they really upped the film’s surrealistic nature.
Not knowing exactly what happened at the end was…well, it was exactly what the movie called for. Aside from the added benefit of being able to leave the movie feeling as though the monster was still destroying everything in sight, the door is open for future stories, whether they come by way of a sequel, comics or some screwy viral website. It’s left us wanting to know more, but in a way that will help avoid needing to retcon anything we’ve already seen or heard.
I’ve been reading a ton of fan reviews, and for all the people that loved it, there are plenty who hated it. I can understand why someone might feel a bit let down: The hype was so tremendous, and if I was being honest, all of the trailers and promos pointed to a movie with a far scarier tone than Cloverfield actually had. But isn’t it more fair to judge the film based on what we were given, rather than on what we might’ve been teased with? When I force myself to do that, I am beyond satisfied. I can’t wait to see it again, and I’m salivating over the prospects of what the future may hold. The film has done tremendous business so far, so we’re definitely poised to get more of the story in some form.
For now, I’ll just have fun theorizing about what’s what and what’s not, and imagining horrible and awesome events every time I go into work and look up at the big buildings. I believe that a film that can serve as such a fantasy catalyst is a different kind of success, and any faults I can find with Cloverfield are totally eradicated by the fact that it’s one of the few pieces of entertainment in recent memory that’s really got me dreaming again.
I could go on and on in circles and ovals, but I’ll stop here…except for a few small points about the movie, after the jump. Just want to point out a couple of things you may have missed or been confused about if you saw Cloverfield without any pre or post research…
More than one giant monster?
There’s been a lot of speculation that more than a single monster attacked, explaining its ability to turn up in vastly different locations from one seeming moment to the next, and the fact that it seemed to look a little bit different in each of the scenes it was in. I don’t personally believe that this was the case, but I do think that it may end up being the case later. If/when there is a sequel — even if it’s simply another group’s tape of the same events — I’d put money on there being more than one monster. Intentionally or not, they’ve laid the groundwork for it, and it was really fun to watch the film for a second time with that perspective in mind. There’s a lot in support of it even in spite of the evidence against.
Did you see it?
At the very end of the film, when it cuts to Rob and Beth in Coney Island, the establishing shot of the ocean hides a subtle secret. Look close at the boat at the bottom right of the screen, and you’ll notice something shoot down and splash into the water, like a meteor. It’s extremely subtle: I didn’t see it in my first viewing, and would not have noticed it the second time if I hadn’t read about it first.
Without going into too much detail on the viral campaign, this object could be one of four things. The first option: It’s the monster itself arriving on earth a month before its grand debut in NYC. Option 2: It’s a piece of a satellite crashing into the ocean, which could be nothing more than a nod to fans who’ve followed the viral stuff. Option 3: It’s a piece of the satellite with the monster attached to it; a satisfying answer both for those who followed the campaign and those who didn’t. Option 4: A meaningless red herring.
If the true answer was obvious, we wouldn’t be discussing it, so don’t bet on anyone coming forward with a tell-all just yet. As with some of the other debatable plot points, I think they’ve done a terrific job of covering their tracks so that any future answers given won’t necessarily contradict what we’ve already seen.
Poor Marlena
If you’ve followed Cloverfield, this will come as no surprise, but if you just saw the movie on a whim, you might’ve missed the point. Though some people suspect that the “infected” Marlena was shot behind the curtain as a matter of “containment” during the scene in the makeshift hospital full of Hazmat suits, the silhouette you saw actually depicts Marlena’s stomach rapidly expanding before exploding.
So, the running theory is that being bit by one of the spider-esque creatures delivers a foreign toxin which reacts very badly with human physiology, turning what might’ve normally been a poisonous death sentence into something far more visual. There’s some speculation that being bit causes a person to give birth to another mini-monster, but there’s no solid proof to support that, nor was there enough commotion behind the curtain to suggest that a mini-monster leapt from Marlena’s stomach to attack anyone. Still, if any sequels or extended lore dared to add that in as fact, we couldn’t really contradict it with the vague answers we received.
Shhhhhh.
At the end of the credits, there’s a small bit of whispering. If you play that whisper backwards, it sounds like Rob (or possibly someone else) saying, “it’s still alive.” Yay!
I’m curious to hear what you guys thought. And yes, you’re allowed to hate the film…if you really want to.
Posted by Matt. E-mail me!
Ghosted by 
I just got back from the movie, so here are my immediate post-viewing thoughts and feelings. I WILL GIVE MAJOR SPOILERS, INCLUDING THE ENDING, SO CONSIDER THIS YOUR WARNING!!!
First off, anyone who says they’ve never seen this monster before is wrong. You saw it in your nightmares when you were a 5 years old. Honestly, J.J. Abrams seems to have mined the collective unconscious for this monster, because it is viscerally terrifying, in ways that King Kong, Godzilla and other big bad guys aren’t. I think I can take a fairly good crack at describing it too. I think it’s half-fish, half-insect. If I had to compare it to two real-life animals, I’d say it has the back and tail of a sting ray and the face, eyes and legs of a Praying Mantis, with huge fucking teeth thrown in for good measure. For the record, I think the little guys are baby versions: they look just the big one, particularly the teeth and the legs.
I’d give the movie as a whole a solid “B”. It doesn’t get an A because of the ending. Not the whole third act, just the parts after the copter crash. I just didn’t like it. We didn’t really need to see the monster eat Hud, so up close. I’d seen enough of the monster before that, particularly right before the copter goes down, to know what it looks like, if that was their purpose in doing that scene. Plus, why would a monster that size bother with a tiny human? Something that big doesn’t need one human for sustenance. The whole moment just felt disingenuous to me. If they felt they needed to kill off Hud, they should have had the monster step on him or kick him aside or something, but eating/biting him just didn’t make sense to me, other than to just give the audience a thrill. The worst part though was the way Rob and Beth died, like trapped rats. It bummed me out. I don’t want to leave a fun, “big scary monster” movie bummed out. It was certainly not the typical Hollywood ending, in a movie that was certainly atypical for Hollywood. But it all just felt like the wrong notes to end on for me, those last 3 or 4 scenes. The movie would have been so much better if they’d just have cut to the credits, or the Coney Island scene, after the copter crash. That way, your last images are the teeth lunging and the copter spinning, and you’re left with a more ambiguous ending. But maybe that would have been too “No Country for Old Men”.
My favorite moment in the film was when the group was in the alley and suddenly all hell breaks lose. It was one second nothing, then BAM!, the monster comes, the army comes and suddenly it’s apocalypse. And we get our first good look at the monster. Very cool moment.
As for whether there was more than one monster, the jury is definitely still out. I agree, it did seem to change from time to time. Sometimes it was on two legs, sometimes on four, but it was still the same general monster. I just don’t think it would have gone from the Statue of Liberty, to land (the building falls over very shortly after the Liberty head lands), to the Brooklyn Bridge and then back to land. Doesn’t make sense. I think there might have been one monster in the water and one on land. Or there was some other factor at work. Maybe it teleports?
Besides just being a monster movie, it was also, quite obviously, a big giant Terrorism metaphor. Those evocations of 9/11 were clearly no mistake. But I guess that makes sense; as a society, we’ve always used monster/horror movies to work out our fears of real life horrors. Of course it’s also akin, because the more we see of the monster, the less we really know about it and the more terrifying it becomes.
Overall, though, yeah, it was an interesting filmgoing experience, seeing the monster movie from a first-person point of view. I definitely felt like “I’ve seen this before, but this time it’s different”, right when the group emerged from the building and the crowd started running and screaming. Definitely try to see this one in the theaters if you can, you feel like you’re right there with them the whole time. Oh, and if you’re looking for the splash in the water at the end Matt mentioned, it’s not right by the boat, it’s a little ways to the left. I almost missed it ’cause I was staring at the boat.