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Cloverfield

Review By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

Since the classic King Kong, the giant monster movie is mostly characterized for many as a mixture of old-fashioned thrills and pure dumb fun. However, Japan’s iconic classic Godzilla movie was the first to use the genre as an allegorical symbol of collective social and political concerns of the time.

However, much of that was stripped from the film’s Americanized international release and the subsequently more light-hearted and family-friendly franchise and numerous knockoffs the original Godzilla would spawn in Japan only contributed even more to the giant monster film’s reputation as “dumb, childish fun.” Now J.J. Abrams, the creator of the TV series Felicity and Lost has attempted to use the giant monster genre once again to address the social climate. His result is Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield, now available on DVD.

Discovered video tape footage documents the events of the film. It reveals a group of friends celebrating Rob Hawkins’ (Michael Stahl-David) preparing to go away on a job transfer in Japan in an apartment in Manhattan. During the evening, Rob ends up with a bitter fight with the girl of his dreams Beth (Odette Yustman), causing her to leave the party.

However, their celebration soon turns into terror as the city is under attack, causing panic and chaos in the streets. As Rob and his friends, including younger brother Jason (Mike Vogel), his girlfriend Lily(Jessica Lucas), and acquaintance Marlena (Lizzy Caplan) attempt to survive, they discover their attacker is in fact a mysterious giant creature with a spawn of feral parasites.

With everything being captured on tape by best friend Hud (T.J. Miller), Rob and his friends attempt to rescue Beth, who is clinging to life when her apartment in Midtown is destroyed. They attempt to flee the city against the odds and somehow try to make sense of what is happening around them.

Shrouded in immense secrecy in its buildup to its release, Cloverfield proves to be a film well worth its hype. Taking up on the postmodern reality-blurring mystique of the groundbreaking horror film The Blair Witch Project, the film’s intriguing concept is immediately handicapped by the same disjointed, fragmented narrative and nausea-ridden shaky camera that is sure to not sit completely well with regular moviegoers.

However, Cloverfield’s concept manages to refine the mysterious, but fairly mindless Blair Witch. First, it manages to do the near-impossible in a giant monster film and focus completely on the humans and their