I had a lot of fun with this inside-out take on the monster movie.
TheShiznit.co.uk
October 14, 2012
So what is Cloverfield? The best Godzilla film never made? A re-invention of the monster movie genre? You could certainly argue both points: it feels like every creature feature you ever saw, but seen from a totally fresh point of view.
The characters are fleshed out participants in the mayhem, not merely disposable vessels designed to stand in all the right places when buildings come crashing down.
The mechanism is the message in Cloverfield, a movie so aluminum-sleek, ultra-portable, and itsy-bitsy sexy, it's amazing Steve Jobs didn't pull it out of an envelope at Macworld.
Imagine if somebody came up to you, grabbed your head, and jiggled it around for 80 minutes. Now imagine they did that while you were trying to watch a movie about a monster attacking New York City.
Under the modern flummery, behind the faux amateurism and the handheld shudder, Cloverfield is a vastly old-fashioned piece of work, creaking with hilarious contrivance.
The fleeting, incomplete glimpses of the monster early on prove the old dictum of B-movie auteur Val Lewton that a momentary image can have greater impact than a prolonged one.
Cloverfield should be best appreciated for throwing down the gauntlet for a new cinematic representation of mass destruction and, thus, the way we see ourselves seeing our worst fears.