Cloverfield
Films have been destroying New York City long before those planes hit. Independence Day’s aliens used the Empire State Building as their bullseye and incinerated the city with their big blue beam. A.I. turned it into an ice cube, and Armageddon spattered it with meteorites, burning through skyscrapers like cigarette ash on tissue. But since the real life jumbo-jet Jenga there’s been a different approach to wrecking the city. The Day After Tomorrow (2004) followed on from A.I. and once again flooded and froze NYC, but this time we stayed through the catastrophe with some geeks in a library. And when more aliens came with yet more annihilation in The War of the Worlds (2005), we escorted Tom Cruise on his bewildering journey around his neighbourhood and were treated to a constant sprinkling of dust and paper, undeniably recalling the eerie confetti of Lower Manhattan.
Once upon a movie, bedtime for The City That Never Sleeps was a spectator sport. Now, post-9/11 cinema has shifted perspective to a much more personal experience.
Thanks to news satellites, millions saw the second plane hit and millions more watched live as the towers fell. Unlike any other event before or since, a massive worldwide audience had first-hand exposure to those events. What would normally have been received through news clips, headlines and various other media abstractions became a very real experience to all those who witnessed it.
In I Am Legend (2007) NYC was ground zero for yet another apocalypse, and although we had the spectacle of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges being blown up, we experienced it through the eyes of a panicked family. Busting up New York is no longer akin to the cheap thrill of fireworks. The consequences of these awesome spectacles can’t be ignored.
Cloverfield (2008) seems to be the logical conclusion to all of this. The premise is that we’re watching found camcorder footage of a mysterious event that happened in NYC which the government has dubbed “Cloverfield”. What could be more personal than the everyday medium of family holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries? In fact, the first twenty five minutes of the movie/footage is of a farewell party. However, this event turns out to be completely trivial and scuppers the entire film. The scene should have established a group of characters that we could root for when the impending doom arrives. What we actually get is an insipid bunch of pretty-looking twentysomething yupppies wallowing in the tedious and mundane melodrama of their get-together as if they were teenagers at their first party. By the time the monster gets there and starts blowing up the city, the only reason to dislike the beast is for its lateness.
One of the main conceits of Cloverfield is that we don’t know what’s causing the trouble. At first we don’t even see “it”. There are shadows and reflections, we glimpse parts and hear roars. It should fill us with terror and suspense but inexplicably the film loses its nerve early on and we’re granted full view. What we see is a big, giant… CGI disappointment, not least because the last remaining reason to keep watching is gone. Where’s the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man when you need him?
Cloverfield should never have been made by Hollywood (and certainly shouldn’t have been called “Cloverfield”; good name for a Range Rover dealership in Windsor, stupid name for a monster movie). There’s an inherent cheapness in the script that would have been perfect for an inventive new director with no money: unknown actors, keeping the monster off-screen, scenes in dark subway tunnels and empty department stores, shooting with a camcorder! -all of this is perfectly designed for a low-budget film. In the end it’s hard to see where the film’s $25million budget went.
There’s a sequence where the humourless characters head to the twin-towered Time Warner Center to rescue a friend. One of the towers has fallen and is resting against its neighbour. The characters go up the standing one and climb into the leaning one, traversing its wonky floors with all the conviction of Adam West’s Batman climbing up the side of a building.
It takes some nerve to use the Time Warner Center like that. Not so much for exploiting September 11th -like I’ve said, all the recent NYC-wrecking films have used 9/11 imagery to some degree -but for its unashamed lack of subtlety or imagination. Perhaps Cloverfield marks the beginning of the end of the NYC personal disaster movie and a return to the glib, anonymous spectacles we used to take for granted.
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