Cloverfield

written by Drew Goddard

directed by Matt Reeves

So you’ve watched Godzilla. You’ve seen King Kong hanging off the side of the Empire State Building. You’re all sci-fi’d up on Alien and Predator and even the battle between the two. What’s Cloverfield? What does it think it is? What does it present as? What does it want to be? What actually is it?

** Warning: This review might be deemed to contain spoilers **

I don’t know the names of the actors. In a sense, that’s part of the brilliance. Samuel L Jackson isn’t the Chief of Army forces. Leonardo DiCaprio isn’t the boy-ish star role (though there is, nonetheless, something of a boy-ish star role). And neither Bruce Willis or Mel Gibson play a some-day hero.

Cloverfield doesn’t try to be a sci-fi. There are no white-coated nerds scrambling to diagnose the strange being that wreaks havoc on the streets of Manhattan. The film ends with neither a miracle of scientific genius or a triumph of military strength.

Sat writing this review, I can’t tell you much about the monster creature. I wasn’t told anything about it and was only given fleeting glances of it as it rampaged past the main characters in their panic-stricken frenzy and plot to escape. But you know, I didn’t miss that detail. I found that I didn’t need it.

Cloverfield is a video-diary. If you momentarily set aside the far-fetched melodramatic monster-terror storyline, this movie is just a guy with a video camera recording a night with some friends. And that’s where its strength lies. Cloverfield doesn’t pretend to be anything. Granted, one could argue that there are cats with fewer lives than the core characters, but even that strand is dealt satisfying closure. Best of all, after just 70 minutes, the film ends.

Where other titles have strung out sequences of computer generated effects in efforts to draw further gasps of suspense-filled awe and terror in audiences (failing more often than not, or at least struggling), Cloverfield tells the story of its characters and ends.

I was aware of some of the web-based hype that some natty marketeers attempted to whip up around this time last year in anticipation of the film’s release. Aware, but I’m too much of a cynic to have bothered either listening or caring. Watching it in December ’08, ten months after its cinematic release, I don’t feel I missed much at the time and was able to watch the film as it stands, as it is: a well put-together, cleverly written, superbly engineered piece of monster-movie.