Cloverfield: My Review. With a lot of spoilers.

The Tradition of ‘Apocalypse’ 

There are two core themes that run through every great tale of apocalypse, especially in the science fiction variety.

Firstly, a moral statement is made about contemporary society. This can be traced all the way back to the first great apocalyptic sci-fi story, H.G.Wells’ War of the Worlds. The brutal and efficient annihilation of the world’s greatest imperial power by strange and impossibly advanced extra-terrestrial colonialists is a blunt and (even more so at the time) terrifying metaphor about how the European powers were treating the rest of the world at the time, and how objectionable it was.

It is also a theme well implemented in Steven Spielberg’s recent remake of War of the Worlds, and while blended with his own personal ideas, comes across terrifyingly well as America is ‘pacified’ with ease by alien invaders. An intended lesson in the dark side of imperialism.

This theme of moral judgement via apocalypse obviously goes much farther back, and has Biblical connotations too. But within the realm of modern civilisation, it has really been science fiction authors that have managed to continue this theme effectively. The threat of apocalypse has been an ever present one after all, with two world wars, the Cold War, numourous pandemics, global warming and the ever expanding domain of science, and it is only expected for those who are brave enough to think about what tomorrow might hold to consider that it might not hold anything very pleasant, mainly as the result of man’s greed, immorality and lack of empathy for the world around him. It’s almost as though it has gone full circle and ended up in the same place as the Book of Revelations 2000 years ago.

This is an idea that is also prevalent in Far Eastern science fiction, which through a combination of Buddhist ethics and it’s own recent history has arrived at similar conclusions, and is probably most easily visible in the seminal monster-flick Godzilla. Here man’s hubris becomes his own downfall by the father of all by-products of nuclear testing, and it is man who will pay the heavy price for trying to sieze control of such terrible power.

The other great theme that runs through tales of apocalypse is in the final moments of the story, the idea that we should pity those perpetrators of disaster. The aliens in War of the Worlds, for example, are a great, sentient civilization. Having destroyed their own planet, they are in one, desperate last attempt to survive by fleeing to Earth and creating a new homeworld. It is an attempt which ultimately fails (by no act of man), and an entire species with all its history, culture, technology, loves and beliefs is destroyed in an orgy of violence and death of its own making. This is a theme which again still continues up to this day. I guess ‘most’ recently in I Am Legend (which is of course a remake of The Omega Man from the 50’s. But the fact that it is still included in I Am Legend shows you its importance to the genre). You can see it in Godzilla, too. The monster may have wiped out a sizeable area of the city, but it is not the monster’s fault. Man made the beast, and it is man who should be judged morally, not the beast itself.

That’s All Very Well, but What Does It Have to Do With Cloverfield?

Well. You see, after Godzilla came out, as everyone is probably aware, the whole creature-flick B-movie genre was born. Gone are the deep and sombre lessons of judgement and pity, and in comes… well, a guy in a rubber suit jumping on lots of cardboard cut-outs of buildings.

Cloverfield contains nothing of the great themes of the apocalypse genre. There’s no obvious statement on the contemporary nature of New York (or global) society. There’s no attempt to enduce a state of pity for ‘It’ as it rampages around Manhattan. Perhaps that is the film’s great statement. The pure, unfounded meaningless of it all; people run around, get stomped on, die. The end. Perhaps the total lack of a plot is also geared towards this end: some people are at a party, they get separated, they try to meet up, then they all die in an emotionless vacuum and we all leave feeling none the wiser about anything we have just seen.

It is not a good film. Everything feels lazy and under-explored on an emotional level. Not just through what the characters say or do (which is the director’s preogative after all) but through what goes on around them, the situations they are thrown into. We expect mind-boggling stupidity, cliches about love and all of that nonsense, but there’s just nothing to it – these aren’t events that exist to one side of a storyline or a plot, they are the entire film. I walked out the cinema feeling like I couldn’t give a toss about anything that I had just witnessed and it was almost quite frustrating. I really wanted to be sympathetic and engaged by the decisions and reactions of the characters in the film. I really wanted to feel gutted that after so much they had been through they didn’t make it in the end. Instead, I felt like I had just witnessed so much meaningless nonsense there really wasn’t much to think or feel about. Nobody, characters or audience finished that experience feeling like they had learnt anything.

The beginning of the film starts with that long sequence at the party. Clearly I thought influenced by that whole genre of New York-based character driven stories (all that stuff from Woody Allen style indie movies up to Sex and the City etc) and it really seemed like it was going somewhere. But what was the point of it all? Nothing, it turned out. Was it trying to send up that genre, or even take a positive influence from it? No, neither. It didn’t do anything with it. It was just like the first twenty minutes were: “Here are the characters, this one fancies this one, this one doesn’t like this one, bla bla bla, ok, now let’s forget all that and have them running around in circles with a big monster.” 

And then comes the monster’s entrance, which is dramatic and well put together. But I still take issue with it. The whole Statue of Liberty’s head-thing was rediculous. It doesn’t seem to be a particularly likely occurence, even if a giant monster has just touched down to trash New York. And it seems so deliberately put in just as a mechanic to make the audience go “Oooh” that it loses all its impact. Then the immediate scenes of New York being destroyed are clearly taken from video footage of 9/11, which is either impressive on a technological level, or pretty tasteless and perhaps a little objectionable on a moral level – they are using an actual disaster where it actually happened again, just as a very basic mechanic to make the audience go “Ooooh”. Incidentally, isn’t it funny how nobody ever mentioned 9/11 the whole of the way through the film?

The film increasingly decends into stupidity to the point that by the end of the film, you could be watching a really awful B-movie on Cinemax or something. I take no issue with movies like that, they’re great when you haven’t paid to see them and they know how dumb they are. Cloverfield takes itself very seriously though, and I did pay to see it. A lot of the stupidity that really flattens any immersion revolves around ‘bad science’, which I’m going to leave an entire section to since there’s so much of it, but there are other things too. Characters often make incredibly unlikely and stupid decisions just as a reason to drive the action forward. The monster shows up just when they least expect it to – but when the audience most expects it too, unless they haven’t ever seen an action movie in their lives. You almost expect one of the characters to give a Homer Simpson-like “Doh!” after they run down a pitch-black subway tunnel only to find that, whaddaya know, there’s a massive bunch of aliens behind them. But it’s ok, cos guess what? There’s a door right next to them! That’s lucky! And then, it connects to an army field hospital! Jeez if they had gone down that tunnel 30 seconds before or after when they did, they never would have been so lucky!  

It is not a good film. The basis for any story at all is that the guy (Rob Hawkins is it?) is trying to find the girl who just dumped him after a desperate phone call, in Manhattan which is evidently the new ’stomping ground’ for a big monster from outer space. Apart from the reason that it wouldn’t be nearly as exciting if it did, why does the monster never leave Manhattan? Never explained. Why does the monster have such a massive chip on its shoulder? Never explained, alluded to or even guessed at. What did the main characters learn by the end? That a monster that is no more than a plot device for a story that is no more than “Girl dumps man, man finds girl, girl and man make up, girl and man die” is no monster at all. Just, effectively, a guy in a rubber suit jumping on lots of cardboard cut-outs of buildings. Though of course the guy is in one of those blue anamatronic suits now and all the buildings are computer generated. 

And most irritatingly of all, we don’t even see the if the monster dies or not! Cheap movies with lots of explosions and aliens are great, but generally speaking, even if humans aren’t winning, those explosions aren’t very entertaining when they don’t do anything! Think Starship Troopers or the Tremors movies. They are good wholesome brainless movies about humans and monsters. When humans are absolutely powerless it sucks all the fun out of it - which is fine when there is some deeper more significant theme being considered, e.g, War of the Worlds, Alien or even King Kong. but as I think is pretty obvious, nobody in the development of this film considered it worth implanting any sort of statement about anything into this film.

Bad Science in Cloverfield

Well, there is too much of it. Far too much of it.

Let’s start with the monster. Ok, I have no qualms with a giant monster, it’s logically possible. It’s got… a number of legs. That’s ok. It’s got tentacles. Haven’t they all? It’s a big pink squishy tripod, basically, without the deathray. Incidentally, I do think they way the monster is introduced is done very well, even quite far into the film you still don’t know what it really looks like. It is quite scary. Well, until the end when you do get to see it and it isn’t nearly as ugly as you were expecting.

Basically though, the problem is that a monster that was that big, operating under Earth’s gravity, would require a lot of energy to keep going. Apart from one of the characters near the end of the film, it doesn’t appear to ‘eat’ anything. How does it take energy in? How does it keep walking, and roaring, and dropping lots of little aliens out of its rear end? It must be burning a hefty number of calories. Perhaps one argument would be that it can somehow transfer kinetic energy through its ’skin’ thereby gaining the ability to keep functioning – thus making all those explosions that keep ricocheting of it an ample supply of food. But think about it – an organism that needed to constantly hit itself against stuff to gain energy would not last very long in the evolutionary chain, would it? Eventually it’s going to injure itself quite badly, or just plain run out of things to hit to get enough energy to do stuff. Specially if it has been travelling through space for a fair while.

The other main problem with the monster is that it just can’t be that invincible. Ok, so munitions just keep bouncing off its somehow impenetrable hide, but it’s got a big mouth, and eyes, and a nose (I think it does anyway) and those funny little gill things. Are you telling me not a single stray bullet would have hit it in the eye? I’m not going to believe it’s got bulletproof eyes, that’s just stupid. And not a single piece of shrapnel went down one of its gill-holes? That would have done some damage surely.

Perhaps the most rediculous thing about the big monster is the fact that it clearly breathes, using aforementioned gills. Assuming they have any biological or evolutionary function at all, that would have been its Achilles’ heel. It’s pretty hard to breathe in a firestorm, you know, the fire takes away all the oxygen, suffocating our monster here. But assuming that it didn’t, and this is perhaps a grievous oversight of the U.S. military, you could just dump some anthrax or some such on its head and there you go. Bish bash bosh, job’s a good ‘un, home in time for tea. It’s a space monster, it has no immunity to microbes from our planet, let alone artificial nerve agents. Take away the air, replace it with something much more unfriendly and it’s Humanity 1,  Space Monsters 0. 

Now let’s have a look at those funny little things that drop out of it’s… arse, for wont of a better word. These ‘things’ (from here on referred to as “poop spiders”), these poop spiders are also quite silly. Never mind the fact that they are just minature versions of the bugs from Starship Troopers with a couple of extra legs, there is much more wrong with them than that.

They start life tucked away safely on “It”, the big monster, and then drop a good 100 meters down to the ground. However, hand an iron bar to your average woman in her late twenties and she’ll have it beaten to a pulp in a couple of swings. I’ve always been under the impression that being hit a couple of times with an iron bar, even really hard, is going to do a lot less damage than being dropped to the ground from 100 metres up in the air. The original fall to the ground would easily be the end of the average poop spider. They maybe crazed invaders from outer space, but the laws of physics still apply wherever you are in the universe.

Also, I question the evolutionary purpose of poop spiders. Why shed a whole lot of small creatures that then go running round biting things and making them explode? Haven’t you just wiped out the entire food source for your species? Oh but of course they are space aliens – and probably vegetarian or something. However that still doesn’t explain their single-minded determination to go around killing everything, does it? It sure is a waste of energy to run around and kill stuff for no reason. For me, the reality of poop spiders is negligable. 

So the aliens are highly unconvincing. What about humans? We’ll leave tediously-poor-decision-making-for-the-sake-of-plot-continuation to one side, as this has already been dealt with. I think possibly the most appalling example of bad science by humans in this movie is when they finally make it up the wonky condominium and find the hero’s girlfriend, like all silly, feminine, weak and pathetic women in American action films, impaled pretty seriously on a big iron spike. Well if you will leave big iron spikes lying around in your apartment luv… Anyway, there she is, impaled, barely conscious unable to tell if her hero is real or an hallucination. She’s been there for hours. So what do they do? Lift her off the spike, help her to her feet and within ten minutes she’s running around at top speed bashing up poop spiders here, there and everywhere. Did nobody once stop and think that was a little unrealistic? Aside from the severe blood loss she would have suffered, that open wound would have been more than a little painful, one suspects, especially after her so-called friends just took a great big iron spike and wrenched it through her body. I think it was after this I really lost all interest in this film, it seemed to dispense with any semblance of reality after this point, which was completely at odds with the whole ‘filmed through a video camera’ aesthetic.  

But let’s consider that camera for a minute shall we? It’s a pretty amazing piece of kit. I’m not sure where they got it from but it’s awesome machine. You can leave it running for hours without needing to charge it. You can drop it, let it get eaten by a giant space monster and carry it in a helicopter that is flying higher than the average New York scyscraper only to be chewed on by a giant space monster, fall several hundred metres to the ground get caught up in the resulting explosion and it still keeps going! Then, after all this, the tape will still work correctly after a near-direct hit from some of the world’s most advanced military hardware and (possibly although never directly explained) even a hit from nuclear weapons! That’s amazing!

And of course let’s not forget the mobile phone that works on uncharged batteries you get get from your local electronics shop, that’s pretty impressive as well.

Reasons to be cynical 

It’s fair to say I haven’t been following any of the hype surrounding this film. Of the small amount of stuff I have read about it, it is a little disappointing. It’s being billed as a film for the ‘Youtube generation’ or some such nonsense:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7193692.stm

And to be honest, it is obvious that what the director really means is that he got this idea to take a Youtube video and turn it into a movie that would be interesting enough to make people want to sit through two hours of it. There really isn’t too much to it. As for “living through your wildest fears,” it’s not scary, beyond the fancy camera work, there is no story, there’s nothing to engage you other than the increasingly flawed and rediculous gimmicks and plot devices. It’s just a boring creature-feature from 50 odd years ago done like a viral video to connect with ‘the kids’ of the 21st century, whoever and wherever they may be.

If you want to see a genuinely scary, well thought out film about disaster and apocalypse with genuinely impressive camera-work, this would not be it. I would recommend Children of Men or something like that but I get the impression it’s a bit too ‘grown up’ for Cloverfield’s intended audience. Oh well.

So those are my thoughts on Cloverfield. One thing still bugs me though: why is it even called Cloverfield?