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So much about CLOVERFIELD didn't work for me that I couldn't enjoy it. (And there are SPOILERS aplenty in this post, so be warned SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS).
Like FinderWolf, I would have felt let down if we hadn't seen the monster full-on at some point, but I agree that the scariest thing we saw was its howling face as the characters ran into the subway. The closer it looked to being human, or to being a creature capable of emotions, the scarier it became to me. The 9/11 stuff didn't bother me simply because that's the template for destruction from now on. Before the WTC went down we didn't know what a giant building spontaneously collapsing would look like, what the physics would be, how people would react. Now that we know, it would be foolish for filmmakers not to take notes and apply it to the future.
But the first of my two big problems with the movie is the shakey-cam. 28 DAYS LATER and 28 WEEKS LATER are lessons in walking the knife's edge between getting the immediate, subjective "you are there" feeling of a handheld camera without sacrificing too much clarity and visual storytelling. Those two movies are practically tutorials in how to do this in an action-horror movie. Making the camera an actual character in the movie was an experiment and one that didn't pay off for me. It's an assurance that no threat will appear that is so dire that a human being would have to put down their camera and run like hell. When dealing with a giant monster, why put a boundary on it like this? The threat should be worse than a plane wreck or a car accident. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT sidestepped this problem because all of its terror lay in the tension between looking and not looking, but in a movie that hinges on physical danger, this seemed like a silly handicap to me. Almost like a way of assuring the audience: this won't get that bad, don't worry.
But my real problem with this film wasn't in the blandness of the characters (who felt like they stepped out of ONE TREE HILL) but in the fact that at every step the director, writers and actors made the most boring, most obvious choices. No one ever violated the bounds of propriety in their reactions to a mind-shattering experience, no one ever did anything that would gum up this amusement park ride with actual, you know, real, messy emotions. It all felt predetermined. For example, the producer needs a clear, aerial shot of the monster (they talk about "needing" this in the press notes). So not only do the characters have to rescue Beth, but they then need to run to the pick-up point and get on a helicopter that takes off so we can get our aerial shot. There are a million scarier, more interesting things that could happen here (Beth can't be moved, a bunch of parasites attack, their paths to the helicopters are cut off one after the other) but in order to get their shot the story tracks have to be artifically greased so they move fast.
A million small things that would have been passable on the small screen howled out at me like enormous monuments to fakeness on the big: the party dress and high heeled shoes, a character sprinting through the rubble in bare feet, the difference in scale between the different appearances of the monster (how tiny was it in Central Park?), the sudden depopulation of Manhattan, the only black characters being a bunch of looters, the use of cell phones underground, the fact that within two hours the military had massive field hospitals set up. But overall my big problem was that this was a vehicle for showing off a cool pitch (BLAIR WITCH meets GODZILLA) rather than an actual story with actual people having actual emotions. CLOVERFIELD makes RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD look like Shakespeare. Special effects are neat-o, but I guess I'm an old codger who needs a story to go with them these days. |
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