Cloverfield of dreams.
So, watched Cloverfield last night the way I usually watch films: darkened room, cocooned in my bed and the isolation of a good pair of headphones.
It’d be easy to be glib and make cheap analogies - Godzilla in the style of The Blair Witch Project perhaps. But that would be a grave injustice. It’s a genuinely unsettling monster movie filmed Handicam-style from a first person perspective, presented as a real-time documentary of events as they happen; it feels like found footage rather than an orchestrated and directed Hollywood blockbuster. As a stylistic conceit it’s nothing new, but the careful handling of the format is a joy - flashbacks occur because the events being filmed are being recorded over a previously used tape, a perfectly natural way to inject human emotion into what is effectively a disaster film.
And it’s a hell of a disaster. The lo-fi, in-the-thick-of-it style is matched by some of the most impressive special effects I’ve seen, creating a level of reality that, at times, left me rattled. Inspiration (if you can call it that) has come from the citizen journalism and aftermath of 9/11 and other events - streets coated in dust and ash, the human impact and reactions. The internet has become filled with shaky videos of extraordinary and horrific happenings, a phenomenon that Cloverfield taps into. Children of Men’s kinetic camerawork is another touchstone, the dropping of cinematic gloss in favour of raw effect.
I’m gushing like a ten-year-old with a thesaurus, obviously. Cloverfield has really impressed me. I’m not sure if you could even call the film exciting in a conventional way - the level of true tension pushes it out of that realm, and the total lack of any tongue-in-cheekness that you’d typically find in this genre of movie solidifies the realism. It’s certainly not particularly gory either, sidestepping that pitfall in favour of more human but no less visceral fears. I don’t really want to talk about what actually happens in the film - the experience has to be enjoyed in its entirety.
My only worry is the inevitably inferior sequels that it will spawn. There’s no way they’ll be able to maintain the fresh style of the original; that feeling of watching something inherently new and different can’t be replicated. I’d be happy to be proven wrong though.