Cloverfield

When a genre movie makes a break with what has come before in that genre, it’s easy to go overboard both in praising the new movie and in poo-pooing the old ones. Witness the ridiculous blatheration back in aught-two about how 28 Days Later “redefined” the zombie movie, when really all it did was eliminate the zombies in favor of a bland outbreak story and add a heaping helping of retrogressive misogyny. This is my difficulty in talking about Cloverfield. I’m tempted to say that it redefines the monster movie, but in so saying I’m afraid I will accidentally belittle previous monster movies, particularly the excellent first Godzilla movie (or, I should say, Gojira).

So: Cloverfield doesn’t do anything so dramatic as redefine the monster movie. I can’t even say it’s the best monster movie I’ve seen in years, because then I’d be comparing it to The Host and I honestly can’t think of any good reason to do that, especially not in a way that casts The Host in a negative light. I’m really going to have to settle for calling Cloverfield a damn-good monster movie, and leave it at that.

OK. That’s the end of the equivocating, I promise. Or maybe not. We’ll see.

What to say aside from over-hyping? How about half-assed cultural criticism? Gojira was, among other things, Japan’s response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Cloverfield is in similar fashion the United States’s response to 9/11 (no matter what people on the internet might tell you about that not being the case). This, I think, goes a long way towards explaining the difference between the movies. For one thing, the difference in scale between the two disasters is so huge that comparing them seems obscene. For another, Japan’s marked the brutally obvious end of a brutally obvious war, while America’s marked the beginning of an escalation in one most Americans had previously been unaware of, and actually tend to remain so. Thus the scientific/omniscient point of view in Gojira and the ignorant/limited POV in Cloverfield.

But enough of that. I think maybe the reason I’m having so much trouble coming up with an angle of approach for writing about this movie is that all I really want to say is that it kicks ass. Sure, there are some quibbles I could make—the rescue-the-lady plot tends to the silly side, the script is riddled with implausibilities (I’m about 90% sure that a skyscraper couldn’t really do that), I might have benefited from a pre-movie Dramamine—but “quibbling” is exactly what I would be doing. Cloverfield is an intensely visceral experience. As soon as it ends I can pick it apart endlessly, noting the implausible parts (and deciding I don’t care about them, though tolerance for factual inaccuracy will always be a very personal and irrational thing), comparing it to Gojira, relating it to the evils of global neoliberalism, whatever, but while it’s on all I’m thinking is a comination of “Whee!” and “Aaah!”

I mean, really—eighty-four minutes for a monster movie is like thirty minutes for a rock and roll album: perfect. Any movie that gets my jaded heart racing the way this one does is OK in my book. Any movie I can watch twice and discover the second time that I haven’t forgotten a single moment from the first time is damned impressive. Any movie where I stay to the end of the credits not out of some sense of this-is-what-movie-nerds-do obligation but because the music they’re playing is blowing me away (seriously, it’s like if Ennio Morricone had scored the original Gojira except way way louder), well, at least has good music. I’m convinced that, given time and DVD release, distanced from the hype and clever marketing, and regardless of any sequels, good or bad, this movie will become a classic—in other words, it’s just like Gojira.