In Continuum.

Oh, look! It's Cloverfield coming to town at long last, ending the months of speculations on what the monster is and where in the world it came from. Ever since the first teaser trailer hit the cinemas without a film title, everybody has been fascinated with this movie for all the right, and wrong, reasons. The speculations for this movie went over the hill, spiraled out of control and exploded in the skies and created a hype so big that I feared the film wouldn't have been able to carry things off without everybody hating it in the end. That is what happens when you have viral marketing, you stir up this hype that you may not be able to fulfill at the very end, it's a calculated risk that the crew took and, to a certain extent, it paid off. A movie that was formally known as Slusho, Cheese and Cheese Monster during the production stages, I'd say that it has come a long way from there. Cloverfield is not a conventional field, and I think we can clearly tell from the way the theatrical poster above has no titles or credits whatsoever. This is the same film that people on the Internet speculated as being the sequel to Godzilla, the movie version of Lost, and some even proposed the possibility of it being a Voltron movie. Well, I saw the film last night, and it really wasn't any of those. Here's what the movie was all about.

Rob(Michael Stahl-David) is leaving the States for a job in Japan, and his friends decided to throw a surprise party for him before he leaves. During the party, Hud(T.J. Miller) was the cameraman who documented the party and recorded Rob's friends saying farewells to him on the camera, all the while being distracted and fascinated with a girl called Marlena(Lizzy Caplan). The party was going well and everybody was having a great time, until Rob's ex-girlfriend Beth(Odette Yustman) brought another guy to the party and spoiled Rob's mood for the rest of the night. So Hud and Jason(Mike Vogel), Rob's brother, made it their goal to cheer him up outside on the fire escape, telling him to move on to a better life out there and think only about the life in Japan. Sounds like one of those brainless teenage love triangle dramas on television, but here's where it starts to get really fun and nasty at the same time. While they were on the fire escape, they hear a loud roar in the distance and the ground started to shake. They all thought that it was an earthquake, but something like that in the middle of Manhattan was strange. So they went up to the roof to see if they could see anything, and that is when all Hell truly broke lose. Something, found them.

This is a monster movie, everybody knows from the very beginning. There were some people who suggested otherwise, but there are times whereby J.J. Abrams can be smart, but not that smart. This movie is a movie about a monster thrashing up the whole city and unleashing Hell in the middle of New York City, but it's also a monster movie with a twist. You don't get the usual wide sweeping shots of the monster climbing up a tall building and spitting fire, nor do you actually see the monsters from a variety of angles because it just looks cooler to shoot that way. This film decided that it'd be better to show the monster from the perspective of a confused cameraman and his handheld camera throughout the film. So instead of those wide sweeping shots we usually get overhead from a monster movie, here we have a 90 minute home-made movie taped on an amateur camera. Think about The Blair Witch Project meeting Godzilla, but with a bigger budget and less snort dripping from the nose. 

The first film that came to my mind when I saw the trailer was definitely the horrendous Blair Witch Project, which was marketed to be a real roll of film found in the wilderness, shown to the public because of how shocking the content is. Of course, it was all part of the marketing geniuses' plans, but the audience bought the trick anyway. This time around, we are supposed to believe that New York City has been demolished by this giant monster, and we have found a tape in Central Park that documented the whole night - somehow. It's an interesting twist to a really old concept, a concept which has been around ever since giant monsters were created for the silver screen. Nobody has ever thought that filming a giant monster movie from the perspective of a cameraman throughout would be a great idea, but this is what Cloverfield accomplished. But at the same time, with the originality of the film pushing the envelope, there are aspects of the film that were greatly compromised as a result - here's how.

Right from the first time you see the fireball in the distance, the tension begins to build throughout the movie as you are not exactly sure what the monster is, or where it is in the mind-boggling map of the streets. You are constantly running away from a monster which may be just around the corner most of the time, and that is not to mention those nasty giant fleas that fall off its body to attack humans by infecting them with a body bursting virus of some kind. It's not the prettiest kind of ambassador you want in your city, but I guess those poor humans didn't really have much of a choice. So the protagonists begin their exile out of the city, with Rob wanting to rescue Beth from her apartment building on the other side of the city. Pulling themselves away from the main route of evacuation, they decided that it'd be the right thing to do to search for Beth on their own, and the whole film basically documents their journey to her home. 

This is a film that is going to be hard to review, because it has areas that I loved and areas that I didn't. I don't remember any recent movies with such a dispute, so many strengths and weaknesses that it becomes difficult for one to tell others how it was. At least for me, I thought the whole concept of filming through a camera was believable, and it was refreshing to view an old genre through a new lens, literally. But at the same time, with the majority of the story being shown on a handheld camera, it is inevitable that a lot storytelling would have to be compromised in order to achieve the kind of realism the filmmakers were after. You don't get a very concrete character development, you don't get a clear view of the monsters because the camera is shaking half of the time - which may be a good thing, since everything is scarier if you cannot see it, and it's just the whole issue with emotional involvement was given a great discount in this film. It just feels like watching a 90 minute YouTube video, watching someone else's party without being able to get involved yourself.

The filmmakers did intend to create some sort of character development by introducing the video footage at the beginning of the film dated in April, with Beth and Rob in bed and just filming each other like a real couple. Then you cut back to the present - May - and the party where you see tension building between the couple and their argument during the party. This part of the film suffered the same flaw as The Blair Witch Project, a film that should have centered a lot more on the main selling point of the film rather than the expository of the characters. It became a little long and draggy for the beginning, and you just couldn't wait for the action to kick start.

When the action does start to unveil itself, you do get a sense that you are right in the middle of it all - which is really what sets this movie away from all the other giant monster films. In the conventional sense, you tend to see yourself more like a passive observer of a situation, whereas this film throws the audience into the dirt and demands the attention of the audience because we are right in the midst of a human versus monster battle. As mentioned before, we don't see a clear picture of the monster for the most part of the movie, and for some reason the characters are always running into the monster. The movie gives us a feeling that it is a low-budget film with all the handheld camera effects and the unknown actors. But with a price tag at $20 million, the special effects in this movie are top-notched. The monster itself is pretty breathtaking, not to mention the scene of desolation around the city and the battles were intense and tight. Someone out to give themselves a visual treat would be greatly rewarded, assuming the fact that you do not have a problem with shaky cameras because this film probably has more of that than any other films I have seen. Then again, you got to give it to Hud the cameraman, he still managed to film a decent amount of steady shots as he ran away from giant fleas and stuff, not too bad.

You don't get to see a lot of monster action, in fact at the end of the movie I was craving for more. Most of the movie was about getting from point A to point B without being killed, about "I love you, let's get out of here", and then more about getting from point B to point C. Along the way we get to meet some of the little monsters, which involved a brilliant scene in the subway and how it involved the night vision camera. Here is where the problem if restricting your game plan to just handheld cameras. There are certain emotions that can only be evoked if you are viewing a bunch of monsters running towards you through the night vision camera, but at the same time there are other things that a handheld camera cannot do. I feel that a lot of time could have been invested on that scene, because it was probably one of those brilliant moments that we are supposed to remember at the end of the film. Instead, we are left with a series of blurry images of the cameraman fighting off the fleas, then another series of shots with the fleas jumping towards the camera - not a lot of night vision brilliance there.

When you take away that emotional involvement, it becomes a little unnecessary for you to kill off all your characters. I mean, it is inevitable for a film like that to involve a few of the cast members dying. But if you are unable to give the characters a three dimensional feel, it becomes pointless to kill them off one by one throughout the film. At least for me, I was like "Oh okay, he is dead. So what." It didn't have a great impact on me, though the whole exploding chest thing was pretty damn cool despite the fact that we never really get a clear idea of what exploded out of the chest at all. In fact, you don't get an explanation for anything at all in the film. You don't know what the monster is, you don't know where it came from, and you don't know what the hell it is doing in New York City. Once again, when you elect to use the handheld camera, these are the information that you have to leave out - which may turn off a few viewers because it is always nice to know a little something about the monster. It was a little hard for me to buy that a monster just so happened to swim ashore and start to destroy the city recklessly. It just didn't make sense.

Even old giant monster movies had monsters with a purpose. They were not exactly stupid monsters who had a thirst for destroying civilizations. In the old Japanese Godzilla films, Godzilla destroyed half the city because another monster threatened to destroy the other. Foolishly, the characters in the film almost always start to root for Godzilla to win, although both of them are equally destructive to Tokyo - lame, but still. In the American version of Godzilla, it was just a badly mutated lizard looking for a nesting ground, and New York City just so happened to be a great place for nesting. At least those monsters had a purpose to attack a city, and the purpose was missing in this film. We see the giant monster stepping on tanks and then pushing buildings over, but to what purpose? Throughout the film, the monster pretty much circles the same area over and over again, and it gives you a sense that it is just this irrational monster with the IQ of a three year old, trying to attract attention for no apparent reason at all. There are rumors on the Internet that the monster actually came from outer space, and you'd think that they probably came to Earth to destroy mankind. Well, they should have done it the way Steven Spielberg filmed War of the Worlds. That, made more sense. This one, didn't.

Still, I wouldn't call this movie a complete flop, though I see a few complaints from the avid fans that followed the film's progress ever since the beginning. It had its moments, and some of those moments were executed really well and intense. It had me on the edge of my seat wondering what was going to happen next, but the lack of closure must have thrown a lot of people off - not to mention the fact that the shaky camera action caused Travers to lose his appetite afterwards. At the end of the film, you just feel like you've sat through a really good YouTube video, and that's about it. You move on to the next video, taking nothing with you from this one, which is kinda sad. This film wins because of its originality and how it stands out from the rest of the movies in this genre. It's a triumph in its own rights, but a triumph with a lot of flaws that could have been eliminated if the filmmakers actually sat down and reviewed their work. As a film watched on a Friday evening, I thought it was gratifying enough, certainly something that took my mind off reality for a good 90 minutes. But is this going to go down as one of the best films of 2008, definitely not. 

7/10