Cloverfield (2008)

May 15, 2023 8:07 AM

Not your average kaiju film.

"Five young New Yorkers throw their friend a going-away party the night that a monster the size of a skyscraper descends upon the city. Told from the point of view of their video camera, the film is a document of their attempt to survive the most surreal, horrifying event of their lives."

Directed by Matt Reeves (The Batman), written by Drew Goddard, produced by J.J. Abrams; was the subject of a very successful viral marketing campaign.

Streaming on Amazon Prime and some other places.

posted by Halloween Jack (17 comments total)

One of the things I like about FanFare is the opportunity to go back and reread what I wrote about a film shortly after release. I liked Colverfield at the time and thought the found-footage framing device (not yet as quite overused as it is now) was clever and very well used to tell the story.

I especially liked the way that flashbacks in the form of un-recorded-over pieces of tape were incorporated. Also, unlike other "clever" films where the conceit cannot be sustained for 2+ hours, Cloverfield has the good sense to be short.

Cloverfield is not a classic or a triumph but has a sub-90 minute big budget experiment I think it succeeds. It was a little jarring seeing characters run through a partially destroyed New York City so soon after 9/11 but that was also clearly intentional. If Japan can work through national trauma using giant monsters I see no reason why the US shouldn't.
posted by AndrewStephens at 9:28 AM on May 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I was kind of surprised that this film hadn't already been posted, even though it came out BFF (Before FanFare). I hadn't actually watched it until yesterday, although I'd seen bits and pieces on YouTube; I think that I'd skipped it on original release because there was so much hype centered around that marketing campaign that I didn't see how the movie could live up to it. And, fifteen or so years out, I don't remember most of the specifics of the hype, but... it was good. The whole point of the movie seems to be as a counter to the usual theme of kaiju movies, which, like space operas, are all about humans being able to mitigate the seemingly unmitigatable--they can figure out the monster's weakness, or somehow befriend it, or get another monster to fight it, or fight it themselves with big-ass mechas.

No such luck here; there's apparently a hidden bit at the end of the credits which suggests that even flattening Manhattan didn't kill the thing. The found-footage structure of the film keeps everything at ground level, more or less, with the film's characters running around and screaming as they find one avenue of escape after another blocked off and have to deal with the thing itself and the fucked-up bug things that drop off it. (Here's a bit from the "Cloverfield Files" detailing what happens to Marlena, with Lizzy Caplan seeming bemused and Matt Reeves discussing some ambiguity about what actually happens to her.) The best that people can do is stick together and help each other as much as they can until it's their turn to die.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:40 AM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also, the movie and its sequels as previously discussed on the blue.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:41 AM on May 15, 2023

This is a film where a sequel came out better than the predecessor (Cloverfield Lane). The latter really showcased the terror of "what" could be happening, while this film teased what was happening. Perhaps I had my hopes up too high, but I found the film not nearly as engaging or entertaining as I wanted it to be with the build up. Not to mention, from Blair Witch to the present, I've yet to find a found film style movie that I really enjoyed. Perhaps it's the discontinuity of the sudden cuts and jumps, I'm not sure. I don't remember really like the characters in this film, either. I'll probably give it another go someday, but like a lot of JJ stuff at the time - the hype and expectation was so much better than the original thing.
posted by Atreides at 10:44 AM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Watching this in the theater completely gave me flashbacks to 9/11, making it the most terrifying movie-going experience I’d had since leaving a midnight showing of The Grudge and having a black cat cross my path on an empty street on the way back to my car (if you’ve seen it you know). The destruction of a signature element of the NYC skyline was reference enough, but when the fucked-up bug things drop off the monster and start attacking people in the street, it made my blood freeze with the same feeling from that day that awful things beyond imagining were happening. I found the movie to be extremely effective and wonderfully concise (when I read up on the associated ARG later, it all seemed like unnecessary world building bloat).

I haven’t rewatched it since that first time—I’m sure not having the same physical reaction will make it seem much tamer the second time around.

And it’s unfortunate that the movie’s success resulted in such a half-assed attempt at creating a franchise by slapping the Cloverfield name on unrelated films. 10 Cloverfield Lane was excellent, but both films are weakened if you try to draw connections between them. Cloverfield Paradox should never have been committed to film—what a stinkeroo.
posted by ejs at 11:20 AM on May 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

One of the interesting things about the "Cloververse" is that both sequels were originally developed as independent films, and sort of retconned into the same universe during production; conversely, A Quiet Place was considered for inclusion but ultimately developed as an independent film.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:29 AM on May 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

One of the interesting things about the "Cloververse" is that both sequels were originally developed as independent films, and sort of retconned into the same universe during production

Same thing happened with the Die Hard movies -- only the fifth one was specifically written as a Die Hard movie.
posted by Etrigan at 11:49 AM on May 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I liked it OK. It’s not in the top tier of either Giant Monster or Found Footage sub-genres, but it’s a decent contender for 2nd rank in both. Reticence to show the monster is almost always a virtue, but Cloverfield manages to focus on the immensity by keeping the scale human, most of the time. That the humans are not super-likable is also fine.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:48 PM on May 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

It’s an interesting, and largely successful, experiment. The detail that utterly breaks the spell, though (for me) is the idea that some dude keeps his video cam running and focused on everyone/everything even while running for dear life throughout an ongoing disaster.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:54 PM on May 15, 2023

some dude keeps his video cam running and focused on everyone/everything even while running for dear life throughout an ongoing disaster.

Agreed, but it would feel more believable today (with phone video) than it did back then.
posted by Pryde at 4:51 PM on May 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Agreed, but it would feel more believable today (with phone video) than it did back then.

I don’t agree. It would still be a case of “pointing a camera at horrors while running away from them, and keeping them in frame and in focus” instead of pocketing the damn phone and hauling your ass out of danger.

I love the found-footage genre/conceit, but little details can kill the effect.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:07 PM on May 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Haha Thorzdad I think the way to do it now would be a found-footage film made up of shots from many different people’s devices. The only editing allowed would be cutting to a new source after the person holding the previous phone dies — dies because like many people they were filming or streaming the catastrophe instead of running the fuck away.
posted by sixswitch at 5:49 AM on May 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm a huge found footage nerd and love this for taking the genre in a direction that it hadn't gone, and still really hasn't gone back to.

The really funny thing, as I've said elsewhere, is that JJ Abrams said he made the movie because he was in Japan and saw Godzilla toys, and felt that the USA needed its own Godzilla. In the first fifteen years, Toho made ten Godzilla movies. Abrams has, in the first fifteen years after Cloverfield, barely touched the creature at all. Seems like the plan changed!
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:55 AM on May 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'd also read that Abrams saw the infamously deceptive poster for Escape from New York, in which the head of the Statue of Liberty was laying in the street (in fact, the very first scene in the movie shows the intact Statue being used as the HQ for the United States Police Force), and went, OK, someone should actually do a movie with that in it, though.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:24 AM on May 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

My recollection from seeing it on its original cinematic release is that virtually none of the characters were at all likable, which made it hard to sympathise. I think the only exception being the woman who gets bit and later sort of bursts behind a sheet.

I haven't seen the second one, but I actually enjoyed the third one more than the first.
posted by biffa at 2:52 PM on May 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think the way to do it now would be a found-footage film made up of shots from many different people’s devices.

I'd heard that there was talk of doing something similar as a sequel - there's a scene where we see other people are filming the monster on their own cameras or cameraphones as well, and the sequel would be the found footage from one of those other people.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:16 AM on May 17, 2023

This film came out during peak the peak of the motion sickness inducing film trend. (Thanks Blair Witch). I “saw” it in the theater but didn’t spend more than five minutes actually looking at the screen. I wound up leaving my seat and sitting around the corner where I could still hear the audio. It was surprisingly easy to follow that way.
posted by Karmakaze at 12:25 PM on May 21, 2023