Ahoy mateys, there be spoilers ahead!
Last weekend I was able to wrangle a “Get out of the house free” card, which enabled me to see the movie “Cloverfield.” I’ve been excited to see this movie since I viewed the preview at the atrocious “Transformers” movie premier.
I spent three weeks studiously avoiding any sources of review so that I would be able to enter “Cloverfield” as a blank slate. Granted, I rarely watch anything besides the History channel and DIY Network, but still, it wasn’t easy to avoid spoilers. Hell, I even avoided RottenTomatoes.com, and I always visit them before hitting the theater.
Having overcome my information addiction (Johnny 5 need input!) I entered the theater with an open mind and high hopes.
90 minutes later I exited feeling the dueling emotions of disappointment and joy. The movie was pretty much what I thought it would be, but fell far short of what I hoped it would be.
After watching the trailer, I had guessed that it was going to be a “Godzilla” style monster movie, although filmed from a first person perspective. It had a lot of cool possibilities, and I know a lot of people that swear J. J. Abrams is a god due to his work on “Lost” which I have never seen.
The movie opens with some cool Department of Defense (DoD) graphics and proceeds to explain that the following footage was recovered from a SD card in the area formerly known as Central Park. It was a nice touch, and helped to set the mood.
The first 4-5 minutes are jumpy and disconnected, and it becomes apparent that there are two different movies on the tape. The skipping of the time stamp on the ‘video’ added a nice touch of authenticity, although the movie gives up on that convention pretty quick.
The basic premise of the story is that Jason Hawkins (Mike Vogel) and Lily Ford (Jessica Lucas) who are dating, are throwing a surprise going away party for Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David) who is leaving in the morning to start a new job in Japan.
At the party Jason ditches the camera by giving it to Hudson ‘Hud’ Platt (T.J. Miller), a dim-witted but good meaning friend with instructions to film messages from well-wishers to be given to Rob at the end of the weekend. From there Hud predictably films as much cleavage and ass as he can, focusing particularly on Marlena (Lizzy Caplan).
Rob enters eventually, and is surprised by the goings on. Slightly later Beth (Odette Yustman) enters with a date and Rob becomes agitated. We come to find out, through Hud, that Beth and Rob had slept together and Rob had never called her. Bastard!
Beth leaves in a huff after her and Rob fight, with Rob zinging her with a snarky comment as she exits the door. Two minutes later there’s a massive earthquake, and everybody is unsettled. The TV states that an oil tanker capsized near Ellis Island. Everybody runs to the roof and tries to make out what happened.
Suddenly giant fireballs start heading towards the exposed crowd, which rush en masse to the stairwell, where they proceed to… the street? As they’re standing there looking around, the biggest fireball of all impacts two blocks away and makes a beeline for the camera, knocking cars around willy-nilly.
Hud stands up, focuses, and oh my god, it’s Lady Liberty’s head. Which, if you had seen any of the promotional material, should come as no surprise.
A big cloud of dust comes rolling along from uptown, and judging by the way it was staged, was filmed to evoke memories of September, with glassy-eyed business people wandering around coated in dust. Effective, but an emotional cheap shot.
Jason, Rob, Lily, Hud, and Marlena make a beeline towards the Brooklyn Bridge and safety. Halfway across the bridge Rob gets a call from Beth. The crowd seperates Jason from the rest, and he climbs a light pole to see them. At which point a massive tail comes swooping in from off screen and pulverizes a 20 foot span of bridge.
The remaining members of the original group flee towards solid land, and make it, just before the bridge collapses. Completely ignoring the fact that his brother was atomized two minutes previous, Rob enters an electronics store that’s being vigorously looted, with Hud following on his heels to document his friend’s theft of a new cell phone battery, which died in the middle of his conversation with Beth. Alas, no cellular service!
Rob decides to head uptown, to ground zero, to check on Beth. Some sense of loyalty, or perhaps a longing for familiarity, drive Hud, Lily, and Marlena to follow Rob in his insane quest.
The intrepid group bypasses several military convoys leading lines of citizens to safety. As they’re having a discussion about leaving, two surface to air missiles come flying overhead at an altitude of 15 feet and rising. The camera pans as they impact on the monster, which is approximately two blocks away.
How a 900 foot tall monster was able to sneak that close without rattling cars out of their parking spots is beyond me.
Everybody dives for cover as a platoon races down the street, front-line infantry firing M16’s, missiles, mortars, curse words, pithy comments, and anything else they think may hurt the monster. They’re backed up by several Abrams tanks, which managed to sneak up within a block before making any noise. Amazing stealth technology the Army has.
Our heroes dive into a conveniently located subway entrance, which collapses after they enter. After sitting around for a while Rob receives a call. While underground. In a war zone. I can’t even get decent service when I go to Wal-Mart, but he gets it two stories underground while the Apocalypse rages overhead? I need to switch carriers I guess.
After an hour or so of cooling their heels, Rob decides to walk the tracks to the next station. After fumbling around in the dark for a while, they decide to use the built in light on the camera. I will point out that this camera has been in more or less constant use for roughly three hours at this point, and it still has enough juice to record and light the way. That’s a pretty amazing battery they’ve got there.
As our heroes bravely tromp forward, they’re inundated in an ankle deep swarm of rats. Rather than acknowledging the rats fleeing a sinking ship behavior, they stand around pissing and moaning until they hear some weird sounds coming from behind.
Rob messes with the camera, and flips on the night vision, which, shockingly, reveals two somethings hanging from the ceiling, which I will refer to here as ‘Zerglings,’ which I will explain later.
The Zerglings look like spider/parrot hybrids the size of a German Shepard, with a temperament to match. A brief struggle ensues, and with the help of some rebar our plucky goth girl Marlena bashes a path through to a rather conveniently located, as well as unexplained door.
The crew tumbles into a small break room and struggles to shut the door. Excepting a large gash on Marlena’s back, everybody is ok. Another hour or so passes, before they decide to check out what’s on the other side of the 2nd door to the room. Gasp, a station!
They exit into the basement level of a department store, where they’re intercepted by soldiers. We learn that this building is being used as a triage center. Rob keeps repeating stupidly about how he has to get to Beth, and by this point I was hoping the CO would actually deck him.
Marlena pipes up that she doesn’t feel well, and when we look at her, she’s bleeding from the eyes, kind of like an Angels and Airwaves album cover. Two people in biohazard suits grab her and escort her behind a conveniently opaque curtain. Two seconds after the curtain drops there’s a big gush of blood, and the soldiers panic.
My friend Adam and I disagree on what happened. He thinks the bites just make people explode. I figure that seeing as how they ripped off a bunch of other stuff from the “Aliens” franchise, that they reproduce in human hosts. That explains, in my mind, the exploding humans, and panicked soldiers. But I digress.
A grunt takes pity on our (now) trio and leads them to a back entrance. He gives them the time and location of the evacuation zone, pushes them out of the door, and leaves them to their own devices.
This part I actually liked. So many times I’ve seen some plucky hero survive impossible odds to reach the military, where he is able to convince the CO to dispatch a platoon to follow him to their inevitable demise, regardless of the fact that they’re outnumbered, their positions are being overrun, and they passed FUBAR hours ago. So to me, it was refreshing to see them turned out on their proverbial ear.
Undeterred by everything up to this point they continue walking, and filming, until Rob stops in horror as he gazes at a building that has broken in half 30 stories up and is leaning drunkenly against a nearby building. Any guesses as to where Beth lives? If you guessed the broken building, your brain cells are apparently still firing.
At this point I would have bid Rob a fond farewell. Assuming that I had followed him this far at all. I’m willing to kill for pussy, but not to die for it. I’m pretty sure that Rob isn’t planning to cut Hud and Lily in on the action anyway.
Stupidly soldiering on in the face of implausibly overwhelming odds, Dudley Doright and his band of amateur medics walk up 60 flights of stairs, cross a pile of rubble 18 inches across to the roof of the broken building, and descend 30 floors to Beth’s apartment.
They break in to discover Beth, impaled on rebar, on the left side of her chest. She opens her eyes and has a moment with Rob, at which point he uses all of the knowledge he gained from playing Operation when he was at summer camp, and convinces the gang to pull her off of the rebar.
Beth has been laying impaled for around 5 hours by this time. If massive blood loss hadn’t killed her, shock surely should have. Barring (no pun intended) all that, she would be suffering from at least a punctured lung from her impalement, and exposure, having lain buffeted with the winds that come from being 30 stories into the sky.
Thinking back to Cub Scouts, and all of the basic first aid he learned there, Rob wraps the gaping wound in Beth’s chest with a t-shirt, puts an arm around her shoulder, and marches her up to the top of the building.
As they’re crossing the scrap bridge they spy the monster a half mile away and heading right for them at a good clip. They descend the intact building, and reach the street where the monster sneaks up on them again as they’re about the reach the landing zone.
Assuming it took them less than, say eight hours, to haul an injured woman up and down 90 flights of stairs combined, judging by the speed and trajectory of the monster it should have been crossing into Vermont by the point they actually reached ground level.
Anyway, they reach the drop zone and Lily boards the second to last helicopter while Hud remains with Rob and Beth. The helicopter flies off of screen, and 35 seconds later flaming metal comes streaking across the plaza and impacts a building. Adam contends that it was a tank the monster kicked, while I prefer to think that it was Lily’s helicopter, since at this point I hate all of them and am actively rooting for their demise.
Somehow the Army holds the monster for our (again) trio to board a helicopter. They take off, and the pilot makes a slow circle around as we see a Stealth bomber unload several metric tons of whoop-ass on the the beast. There’s a big fireball, some cheering, and then the creature appears and swats the helicopter down.
Now the helicopter was about a half mile in the sky, and at least a mile away from the monster when the bombing commenced. I suppose it just teleported there or something. Since my suspension of disbelief has been suspended since about the subway tunnel, I had just given up on trying to make sense of some stuff.
The helicopter crashes. All dead. Yay! But wait! Miraculously Rob, Beth and Hud have all survived. Rob’s leg is broken so Beth helps him from the wreckage, which surprisingly isn’t burning. Hud leaves but then comes back for the camera. He looks up, into the looming maw of the monster. It picks up the helicopter, chews on it for a while, and spits it out. Hud is dead. About damn time.
Of all the characters, Hud was the one I was most rooting for to die. His inane, nonsensical commentary was grating at the best of times, and at the worst made me want to grind my teeth. I have nothing against the actor, but I swear that Hud was really short for Chud.
Rob and Beth make their way over to check on Hud. And. Grab. The. Goddamn. Camera. Again.
They run to a bridge in the middle of Central Park where they film their final goodbyes, profess their love, and die in a massive fireball that collapses the five tons of ornate brickwork above them. Finally.
I was relieved that everybody died. I know that’s mean of me, but I really hated everybody but Beth, and that’s only because she had all of 8 minutes of screen time. In time, I’m sure I could have hated her too.
The concept of the movie was interesting, but there was too much that just kept taking me out of the moment, and ultimately ruined the experience. The biggest annoyances to me were, in no particular order:
1) Camerawork. It was jittery because they were on the run. Except, who runs with a camera in hand at face level? That’s going to slow you down massively, and you’re probably going to trip over all the shit that isn’t showing up on your viewfinder.
2) Infinite batteries. 10 odd hours of taping, plus using the camera as a flashlight, and it was still going. Until it got crushed. And burned.
3) Infinite memory. I realize that they didn’t film their entire narrative. Thank god. The fact still remains that that must have been at least a one terrabyte memory card. Using a one gigabyte SD card my digital video camera can take around 10-15 minutes of video at low resolution (320*240) under the best of circumstances.
4) No 20-something professional in New York City is going to act so selflessly, especially not for a one night stand.
5) If this movie was a DoD training film, it would have been edited for content. 6 minutes of blurry footage of the creature from a distance, some of the zerglings, and that one crystal clear shot of its anal sphincter from central park. Your government cares, just not about YOU, and certainly not about your interpersonal relationships when national security is at risk.
I understand what they were trying to accomplish with a lot of the stuff that annoyed me, but in the end it was a failure. I will die for friends and family, if it serves a purpose - like taking a bullet or falling on a grenade.
On the other hand, charging into the slavering maw of an unknown creature the size of Wrigley Field is right out. I would like my death to be meaningful and serve a purpose. Ultimately actions speak louder than words, and I don’t want my last actions to scream “Bob Saget should make an inane joke at my expense in a funny voice on national television.”
If you enjoyed this movie, more power to you. In the end, I couldn’t turn the logical side of my brain off long enough to lose myself.
Oh yeah. If you’ve ever played Starcraft you’ll understand the Zerglings references when you watch this movie. They have to be experienced to be understood.
