Cloverfield

****SPOILER ALERT******* PLEASE DO NOT READ IF YOU CARE ABOUT NOT KNOWING THE ENDING OR WHAT HAPPENS IN THIS MOVIE BEFORE YOU SEE IT!!
I was very intrigued by the entire concept of the movie Cloverfield. First, I’m a big J.J. Abrams fan, Alias is one of my all time favorites, I thought his version of Mission Impossible was pretty good, and I’m stuck on the island with everyone on Lost as well. Basically I just think the guy is really creative and I’m interested in his projects. And of course the teaser trailers and extreme secrecy about the movie and the monster were more than enough to peak my interest. Hello, headless Statue of Liberty - how can you resist that? So I went to the movie this weekend, and I will say that J.J. Abrams has definitely made a monster movie unlike any other. I’m not going to say it’s the best monster movie because it has a lot of negative points (which will vary depending on people’s opinions), but it is definitely unique. The most obvious point is that it is all shot as if it were a personal video from someone living through this nightmare – the main characters are regular New Yorkers going about their lives and they take a video tape along with them on their attempts to escape to figure out what is happening or whatever to document the events as proof of everything. As might be expected of people in such a situation, they do a lot of running and falling and hiding and panicking, which leads to some very jumpy filmwork. I recommend seeing this movie on a big screen because of this(its probably even harder to see on a TV), but also sit as far back as you can since it made me a bit nauseated until I moved my seat. However, as sickening as some of the jumpy shots are, I felt that they really served to bring a sense of reality to the movie because I was fighting for every little glimpse of what was going on at the beginning, as were all of the characters. Another potential negative for the film is that there is no easy wrap up in the end. It is not explained what the monsters are or where they came from, and we don’t actually really every find out if they are defeated. We assume that they are because the military basically nukes the city, but we don’t know. The entire film is presented as recovered evidence from the scene, and all we get to see is what the camera saw. My husband found this very frustrating, as did many others I’m sure, but I liked it. Again, I felt it added a sense of reality to the whole movie. The whole film to me really felt like a type of allegory to the events of 9/11 and how it feels to go through the chaotic first hours before you know what is even happening, as well as commentary on how our world has changed. I remember the initial reaction to the first plane hitting the towers as being a mistake or accident of some sort – no one’s first thought jumped to terrorism until that second plane hit. In this movie, when the first shock wave rolls through the city people think that it was an earthquake, but there is also an immediate fear that it might be more attacks. Our assumption of innocence has changed. One of the most unforgettable pieces of footage I saw after 9/11 was where an amateur camera man in standing in the street watching a wave of dust roll towards him and he escapes into a store only to watch as the dust rolls across the windows and renders everything black. This scene is recreated perfectly in the movie, right down to someone’s comment about people still being outside, and it really brought back into focus what a horrifying moment that was. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have something so terrible happen that it completely eradicates the reality you have been living in. No one in the movie would have ever thought that a 200 ft tall monster (from sea/space/military experiment gone wrong?) would show up and lay waste to Manhattan, but no one thought the World Trade Center was coming down that day either. But don’t get me wrong – I was not sitting in the theater pining away for a more gentler world during this movie – I was enjoying the thrills and wondering just what the hell that thing was anyway. Which I’m sure was the movie makers’ intention – to make a thrilling, exciting movie that reinvigorated the monster genre and did it in a totally believable modern way, targeted at all those YouTubers out there. But it did make me think a little too. Let’s just all hope that we have the fortitude to fight the horrors we can imagine, and the luck to survive the ones we can’t. And that J.J. Abrams keeps making movies, cause that guy rocks.