ALIEN HORROR SUMMER - NO. 18: CLOVERFIELD (2008) MOVIE REVIEW
The next entry on our list is the film that put Matt Reeves, Drew Goddard, and a young cast on the map in the found-footage, Kaiju attack movie.
by Nate Lemann
I will say upfront that I am not a fan of the found-footage genre of horror. Often times it uses cheap jump scares to illicit fear from the audience. It also feels antithesis to cinema, forgoing the cinematic eye for shock-jock, vouyersitic scares. That said, what Reeves does with this sleeper hit is basically tell a 9/11-parable set during an alien-Kaiju attack in the middle of Manhattan.
We meet our cast of characters at an apartment party for Rob (Michael Stahl-David) as he’s about to take a big job in Japan. Reeves does an excellent job setting up the complex social dynamics of this friend group which include Rob’s brother Jason (Mike Vogel), his longtime girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas), best friend and “videographer” Hud (T.J. Miller), and Hud’s hopeless crush Marlena (Lizzy Caplan). There is also Beth (Odette Annable), who Rob is madly in love with but she brings a date to the party, leading to a big fight that causes Beth to leave early.
As Rob is licking his wounds, a loud explosion is heard from the ocean. The crew go to the roof to see what it is and soon find themselves in peril as something is destroying and whipping around New York landmarks like they were toys. This kicks off a breathless hour of non-stop action as the crew aims to flee the island but are thwarted at every turn. Reeves and crew do a great job at dolling out pieces of the beast destroying the city, never giving us a head-on look at the monster. Instead, by obscuring the cause of the destruction, we almost feel like we are watching found footage of New Yorkers fleeing the 9/11 attacks. It can be triggering for those with traumatic memories of that day or of any mass tragedy.
The cast is abnormally good for a found footage film, really drawing you into the emotional dynamics of the crew while all the bombast is happening overhead. This feels like the blueprint to the original Monsterverse film “Godzilla” (2014), focusing on the human reaction to such an emergence. This movie played a lot better than I remembered, with the emotional beats packing more weight to them than I could recall. Reeves also has some unforgettable death scenes and acts of pure carnage to also delight the more spectacle-driven viewer.
This may be a found-footage film but it has more blockbuster moments in here that look better and pack more emotional punch than most films in this genre do now.
FINAL RATING: 4/5 Stars (Big time spectacle merged with emotional gravitas)
Comments