Shaky journey finds firm footing

An 80-minute roundabout in low-budget virtual reality, in a good way

Matt Abra, volunteer staff

The movie industry was caught by storm two weekends ago, when Paramount’s new monster flick, Cloverfield, trumped the competition with a $41-million debut, beating out previous recordholder Along Came Polly to earn the biggest January opening ever.

According to studio execs, their pre-release estimates predicted a $20-million opening at best, so the fact that it more than doubled that figure is nothing to brush off, yet speculation has persisted on exactly what it was that drew this record-setting crowd. January is typically a quiet month at the box office, so why were movie-goers suddenly hit with the desire to rush off to a cheaply made event flick? The answer can be conveyed in the simplest of terms — the movie looked “badass.”

Whether it truly lived up to that classification, however, has been the topic of some debate. It was given a grade of C from CinemaScore, Entertainment Weekly’s means of measuring public reaction to films, and my own observations indicate that opinion on the movie has been mixed — I consider it to be a great opening to 2008 at the theatres.

In the Facebook.com day and age, when we’re all booming to experience everything as intimately and personally as possible, Cloverfield has done the best job so far of exploiting that trend for its own selfish validation. And that’s a good thing. The result is something both efficient and unsettlingly claustrophobic. It’s like an 80-minute roundabout in low-budget virtual reality.

The premise is undeniably crooked straight from The Blair Witch Project — lost video footage is found after a mysterious mishap, and we bear witness to the documented fight for survival of a small group of people. In this case, we follow several 20-something folks as they traipse around New York, eluding a giant monster that came out of nowhere, with one of them dragging a camcorder down every street, through every subway tunnel, all because “people are going to want to know how it all went down.” Thus, like Blair Witch, there are some obvious obstacles to get past: are we really supposed to believe that someone would continue filming even as they’re running for their lives?

That, however, is where Cloverfield’s unoriginality stops. The ultimate combination of low-tech household filmmaking with big-budget Hollywood visuals is a sight to behold, and a truly ingenious gimmick, yet it is not one that the filmmakers feel the need to squander too early. The film has incredible patience. The first 20-odd minutes are spent in the apartment of Rob, your typical go-getter hero, as his friends throw a goodbye party for him before he jets off to Japan for a new job. We are introduced to the characters as well as the usual romantic subplot, so that when disaster finally hits, we have some familiar faces to cling to, something you will later appreciate given the jittery frenzy of the whole thing.

Even then, the monster is elusive and mysterious. In classic “Hitchcockian” style, not too much is given away too soon, or at all in some cases. People will probably want to liken Cloverfield to Godzilla more than anything, but I myself was reminded of Hitchcock’s The Birds, with scares that are generated from the ground up, all without the company of music or any sort of viable explanation for any of it. One minute the group is casually drinking beers on a fire escape, the next minute the head of the Statue of Liberty is crashing past their heads. It’s in that type of normalcy interrupted by extreme events that the film finds its ultimate strength.

The characters are likeable, hip, but nothing special. There is no saying that the film couldn’t jump over and follow another stranded group of survivors anywhere in New York. The difference is, these ones have a camera. That is the only reason we are watching this film. It is a terrific concept. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? If big blowout movie effects are taking place somewhere and no one is there to film it, is there a movie? Luckily, in this case, someone brought a cheap camera.

Don’t be frightened off by people and their “deep” insight into films, or even by a seemingly silly premise. Cloverfield is superficial popcorn fun at its best and, thus, definitely worth the trip. Just make sure you go in with that same superficial mindset.