Refunds based on low monster content

Cloverfield is an important movie. Since 9/11, disaster on the home front has been given a grand spotlight, and with that, the effects of these atrocities on the survivors. However trendy it became to show the aftermath of an epic travesty, filmmakers, and the nation as a whole, have turned a blind eye to how disaster effects the hip, attractive, bickering people of these demolished cities…

That is the original opening to my thoughts on Cloverfield. I squealed with glee as I formed each sarcastic sentence, loading round after round of yellow vitriol and blasting it out onto the paper. There were even bits about King Kong and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow man, and this kind of name-dropping may have made it a good read. While I was no fan of this movie, I was torn and as such felt there to be no need to be a dick. Its not like Uwe Boll made the movie.

Warning: Here, there be spoilers.

Lets get this clear – J.J. Abrams was the producer. He is not the writer, nor the director. Sure, his hand can be seen in this movie, but this is not a J.J. Abrams film. If he was responsible for as much as people give him credit for, I worry for the new Trek. It would be 82 minutes about the filthy welders we saw in the trailer, and the curves of the Enterprise would be merely hinted at before an arc welder sparked to life and its glare obstructed the camera from showing anything of value.

If we are to look at Cloverfield historically, there was a time where I liked the movie. The trailer was how all trailers should be; expertly baiting us without providing complete synopsis. The release date came pretty quick, mostly because I didn’t commit it to memory. Its not like Speed Racer, where I etch a hash mark into my skin with each passing day. All of a sudden Cloverfield was imminent, and realization hit…

It was a monster movie. No matter how much mystery shrouded the trailers, no matter how much slight of hand was employed, it was a still a giant monster movie. Not a lot of room for innovation there.

Regardless, we all fought sold-out showings to witness the spectable, and the innovation question remains: Was I wrong, or were they?

As the movie progressed, I was entertained. I will give the Cloverfield that. Even with the witless ultra-hip as our subjects, I clenched and white-knuckled through the thing with the rest of the audience. The story moved at a breakneck, exciting pace, and breathing was not an option when the screws really got turned. As our blazer-wearing principle overcame obstacle on his way to ground zero to rescue his impossibly hot girlfriend, we got visceral, all too real military scenes, a mall-turned-triage, and the realization that all bets were off when it came to the characters mortality. As he approached the leaning tower of hotty, I figured we were moments from him shooting his grappling hook into the belly of the beast, slicing the fiend open with his Motorola Razr, and tossing a concussion grenade into his belly. Maybe Matthew Mcconaughey would jump down the monsters throat with a battle axe. Finger Eleven would play loudly in the background as this happened. Maybe Maroon Five. I would leave that choice to the director.

From there, the film continued to run forward, as everyone in this movie is in one form of run or another, and then it ended. Only 85 minutes had passed and I was left mouth agape, a piece of popcorn desperately clinging to my lip – the movie wasn’t finished. It couldn’t be finished! We didn’t even get to see the monster. No! I paid to see a monster movie. If I had wanted romance and the ham-fisted lesson to enjoy life with those that surround me, I would have seen 27 Dresses this weekend. I had gone to see the movie that was advertised, the one with the running and the screaming, and most important, the monster of considerable size.

One could argue that they never showed the monster. After the movie had its pre-screenings, the internet was flooded with hand-drawn representations of the titular monster, and guess what? They were all different. These were not small differences either, its almost as if the artists were drawing their opinion based off a thin description which, now that I think about it, is exactly what happened. Not showing the monster is a pretty standard technique…you want to build it up before you reveal the thing in all its glory. But there was no revealing, not one ounce of payoff. When we do get the chance to see the entirety of the thing, it’s only moments before being obstructed by a cloud of debris.

Then it ends, and the two bickering attractive people, who I could barely stand before the attack, say they love each other. And there was a comet. The end. When a monster attacks, I’d like to know the outcome. When people explode, I want to know what, if anything, comes out of them. I didn’t think I had to express a need for that information. The lack of detail not only bordered on lazy, it bordered on fucking with the audience.

The rebuttal to all this is “it’s not that kind of monster movie”. I get that. This took a different approach to the genre, and I take that into consideration when I say that Cloverfield failed. Much like Signs asked me to care more about Mel Gibson’s loss of faith than the planet-wide intergalactic invasion, I can not dismiss my wonder for a giant, belligerent monster.

The movie is littered with spectacle: Lady Liberty’s head crashing onto the street, the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge, buildings in ruin and Manhattan realistically destroyed by our own military. But it is spectacle for the sake of spectacle. The execution of this movie was well done, and needed no spectacle to reinforce the fact we were being attacked by a giant, pissed off monster. I stopped being impressed by special effects after LOTR, which was some of the most responsible CGI work in recent memory, so Cloverfield was lost on me. People talk about Cloverfield’s allusions to 9/11, which I am not certain of. It seems like you can’t lay a building to waste without someone saying it was a reference to 9/11, but this is American cinema we’re talking about…buildings are razed pretty systematically here. It’s how we express ourselves. If they were tapping into 9/11 feelings, then it was shitty, manipulative, and only serves to highlight the weaknesses of the gimmick.

Finally, Cloverfield is not a successful story. If it tells a story, it does so by accident. The movie is not about the Cloverfield monster, it is about the night staff of Hollister surviving…until they die. The disaster could have been anything, which is why I think people are screaming about 9/11 so much. Other than the brief subway attack, the story could have revolved around any tragedy, and people are left to relate to it as they see fit. Is this to the films credit? Its manipulation, combining broad strokes with alarming imagery to evoke whatever fear is close at hand. We are given nothing and those who are equally blank combine the results through muddled brain alchemy and call it genius. I don’t fear Cloverfield as a creature. He is not an entity, and considering the lengths they went through to mask him, to only show people reacting to him, shooting at him, he is little more than metaphor.

I don’t see movies to create my own reality. I can do that while I drive and talk on my cell phone. Leaving the answers up to the audience is not originality, plenty of bad movies have done it before Cloverfield. People say lack of answers leaves it open for a sequel. I say it leaves it open for them to finish the fucking movie they made.