The shocks come from nowhere, interrupting
an evening previously distinguished only by garden-variety personal drama. Due
to leave for a job in Japan, Michael Stahl-David spends one last night with his
friends, thanks to a surprise party thrown by his brother (Mike Vogel) and his
brother's girlfriend (Jessica Lucas). When another friend (Odette Yustman)
shows up with a date in tow, news ripples through the crowd that she and
Stahl-David, friends since college, recently slept together, only to declare
the relationship a non-starter because of his imminent departure. It's all
captured for posterity by T.J. Miller, a guest charged with using a video
camera to film testimonials for the guest of honor. Then comes the boom, the
fire, and the sound of the world crumbling.
The secret-shrouded brainchild of producer
J.J. Abrams, writer Drew Goddard, and director Matt Reeves, Cloverfield owes its first-person approach
to 1999's shaky-cam horror classic The Blair Witch Project, a debt it repays by
taking the technique places Blair Witch could never go. If anything, it's a wonder
that more films haven't borrowed the Blair Witch approach in the years
since, particularly since the you-are-there immediacy speaks so directly to a
decade in which camera phones and YouTube have take the middleman out of video.
Cloverfield taps into the spirit of
the age in other, more unsettling ways as well. Its horror is devastating and
citywide. Baffled news anchors report it breathlessly, inspiring panic in
characters who realize that the violence that only happens elsewhere has found
its way home. The monstrous source of the violence maintains an unerring
concentration on destruction, and spawns other, smaller monsters with the same
focus. It leaves terror, broken buildings, and clouds of dust behind. The best
efforts of conventional warfare can't bring it down.
The filmmakers have gone to great lengths
to keep the nature of the threat a secret, so let's just say that it couldn't
have existed without H.P. Lovecraft, H.R. Giger, or Ishirô Honda, the director
who gave Japan an embodiment of its then-recent nuclear attacks with Godzilla. Also, it's absolutely
terrifying, and it's all the more effective for the way it lets viewers spend
time getting to know the terrified stars, and the emotions and regrets behind
their seemingly futile efforts to survive. It puts human faces on the victims
of mass destruction, faces that might easily have been yours or mine, staring
down the maw of something we don't understand.