Ant’s-eye action

>> Cloverfield reinvents the blockbuster
by flipping the perspective

by MARK SLUTSKY

There’s much about Cloverfield that’s familiar. It’s a high-grossing disaster movie, set in New York City, starring a cast of attractive 20-somethings. Still, there’s something different about this monster movie, produced by J.J. Abrams (Alias, Lost) and directed by Matt Reeves. But the fact that it had a relatively low (considering the genre) budget of $30-million and no stars to speak of may be the least unconventional thing about it.

Cloverfield is a reinvention of the Hollywood blockbuster, and while its concept isn’t completely new, it’s executed better than any of its predecessors. Like The Blair Witch Project, the film purports to consist entirely of found video footage shot by the characters in the film, as if it’s a sloppy, real-life document of the kind of events usually portrayed with smooth Hollywood professionalism. The idea is that stripping away the familiar cinematic language of the big-budget event movie rejuvenates the genre.

That’s one, but not the only, element that makes Cloverfield so arresting. Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds had the brilliant idea of staging an alien invasion from the point of view, not of the President, or the military, or even anyone particularly heroic, but a handful of ordinary people caught up in unbelievable events. For most of War of the Worlds, the stars aren’t fighting the aliens, but simply running for their lives.

Abrams and Reeves take the same tack here, and like Spielberg’s movie, the portrayal of normal people in an America under attack is sometimes reminiscent of 9/11 (it’s one of the reasons the movie is so uncomfortably scary at points). The film centres on a group of 20-something friends trying to make it out of New York City alive—and to find a missing love interest—while an unnamed monster, its origins never specified, rampages through the city, causing massive destruction and shedding little, lethal creatures that add another element of danger to the already calamitous situation.

There’s never any question of our heroes actually attacking the monster themselves; their only goal is to find their friend and make it out alive. In any other monster movie, they’d be extras or walk-ons, and it’s that ant’s-eye-view perspective, maybe even more than the “found footage” device, that makes Cloverfield feel different. That’s not to say that the video idea isn’t exploited in interesting ways, though: for instance, the film is periodically interrupted, whenever the camera is “turned off,” by snippets of footage that are presumably being taped over, which, set some weeks before the action of the film, layer the narrative and the characters in an interesting, and even new, way.

For its newness, though, Cloverfield has a persistent anxiety about what kind of movie it wants to be. If you completely stripped away the genre’s conventional movie-ness, you’d get something as tedious and dramatically unfulfilling as real life. So the filmmakers (the real ones) need to make sure it hits enough conventional storytelling beats to keep it satisfying. There’s a love story, there’s action, there’s tension and resolution.

Unlike Blair Witch, you actually see the monster, although they tease you with it for a while (though they go too far in actually showing it). At times, this has the effect of reminding you you’re watching a blockbuster, especially at the implausible and drawn-out ending, but you can’t really have it both ways. It could be that the best solution is to do as Cloverfield does, and split the difference.

Cloverfield is now in theatres

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