Cloverfield (2008)
Directed by Matt Reeves
Five young New Yorkers throw their friend a going-away party the night that a monster the size of a skyscraper descends upon the city. Told from the point of view of their video camera, the film is a document of their attempt to survive the most surreal, horrifying event of their lives.
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26 films that influenced Cloverfield
What critics say influenced Cloverfield
There have been some great ones—2007's " [REC] " and 2008's " Cloverfield " spring to mind—but "The Blair Witch Project" remains the best of the bunch.
I love that it uses The Blair Witch Project as a launchpad for its low-tech, found-footage brilliance; I love its genius-level viral marketing campaign and its Ludditism and overt technophobia.
Comme toute bonne catastrophe qui se respecte, c’est dans les rues de New York que se déroule se croisement pour le moins inusité entre Godzilla et The Blair Witch Project.
The Blair Witch Project and Diary of the Dead proved that this handheld format is completely viable and sustainable in feature length horror films, but it�s difficult to even consider Cloverfield a horror film, since in its action scenes, it�s far more concerned with spectacle than suspense.
I admire the less-is-more aesthetic of films like "Open Water" and was a fan of "The Blair Witch Project," which I described at the time as "a crude but stunningly pure and elemental act of the imagination."
So if an out-of-nowhere groundbreaker like The Blair Witch Project pushed such storytelling over into viable generic territory, then it only makes sense that a big-budget, predetermined hit like Cloverfield would one day consummate that marriage: the blockbuster finally merged with YouTube.
Instead it’s a simple little horror movie, one that apes a lot of the filming techniques used by Paul Greengrass on his brilliant film United 93, but wastes them on a bunch of unlikable, happy to see them drop dead characters and instead ends up being more like the first cousin of Blair Witch.
Yup, there is no doubt that Cloverfield is no less directly inflected with the events of 9/11 than Paul Haggis' United 93 was - although if it has become a clich� to describe the collapse of the Twin Towers as "like something out of a movie", then Cloverfield divides its inspiration accordingly between the real terrors of 2001 and the cinematic horrors of King Kong or Godzilla.
Cloverfield isn't a horror film â it's a pure-blood, grade A, exultantly exhilarating monster movie in the grand tradition of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, It Came From Beneath the Sea, and, to a lesser extent, Merian C. Cooper's King Kong.
According to the end credits, the filmmakers used stills from “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” (1953) and “Them!” (1954).
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And rather than feeling like a “Blair Witch” knock-off, “Cloverfield” brings to mind such disparate projects as “84 Charlie MoPic” (a 1989 indie set in Vietnam, where the entire film is seen from the POV of a combat cameraman), “Special Bulletin” (the acclaimed 1983 TV movie that conveyed the story of a nuclear incident entirely through a fictional network’s news coverage), and “Marvels” (a graphic novel that shows the adventures of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and other superheroes as seen by a news photographer).
Although the cinema verit� camerawork does have a few moments of shakiness, it�s kept to a minimum, so it hooks you in without being nearly as nauseating as the vomit-inducing camera movements in The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield.
Like "The Blair Witch Project" or "Cloverfield," "Paranormal Activity" purports to be documentary footage shot by its subjects, in this case a young couple named Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston, played by actors of the same names.
Even by the standards of obnoxiously dogged documentarians, and let's recall that last year's otherwise kicky Cloverfield set that bar tremendously high, Paranormal's Micah Sloat pushes the envelope to newfound limits of off-putting insensitivity.
Ten years ago, Daniel Meyrick and Eduardo Sanchez become overnight sensations when their no-budget shocker The Blair Witch Project (1999) captured the demise of three doco-makers; both Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s Spanish-language [REC] (2007) and John Erik Dowdle’s shot-for-shot English-language remake Quarantine (2008) utilised found-footage ‘wobbly-cam’ superbly; Matt Reeves’ big-budget Cloverfield (2008) did not.
Cloverfield demonstrated that even Godzilla could learn new tricks.
…specific constraints as Hitchcock did in Lifeboat, Rope and Rear Window.
…specific constraints as Hitchcock did in Lifeboat, Rope and Rear Window.
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The plot moves on 'discovered' footage (like The Blair Witch Project--and Cannibal Holocaust before it, let's face it), with cable news reports glimpsed therein revealing the first truly nasty surprise of the piece.
Like Cannibal Holocaust, which used torture and reprehensible atrocities to take on the glaring, unforgiving eye of the filmmaker, Reeves reinvents the giant creature category of horror to question our perverse POV fixation.
Such critics seem to forget Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, with its dust-covered survivors and its street poles littered with "missing" posters.
It is entirely possible that the last time I saw a film that played a similar card without coming across as exploitive or crude was also a genre film, Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds back in 2005.
Coupled with Kevin Stitt’s complex cutting, Cloverfield is a sustained triumph of expanding and contracting perspectives, its whip-pans from human-scale panic to skyscraper-toppling spectacle raising the bar set by Spielberg’s War of the Worlds—if not Sokurov’s Russian Ark.
This faux-amateur approach really does work unbelievably effectively, to the point where you wonder, "Why aren't all disaster movies filmed like this?" Cloverfield makes movies like Godzilla and Spielberg's War of the Worlds seem incredibly staged and predictable, and that's one hell of an achievement.