‘CLOVERFIELD” combines unpleasantness and stupidity to a degree that would be difficult to match unless you were stuck in bed with a case of the shingles while being forced to watch “The Ghost Whisperer.”
As “The Blair Witch Project” meets “Godzilla” meets the Banana Republic catalog, I’m not sure who suffered more: the characters or me.
They: are being terrorized by a giant monster roaring through Manhattan who’s destroying buildings, knocking down bridges and playing shot put with the Statue of Liberty’s head.
I: was forced to write down page after page of dialogue like this: “What the hell was that?” “Oh, God, this is nasty!” “This is like a nightmare, you know?”
After the monster tries to drag one of the screamers away, we get, “What’s up with that?” Someone who is bleeding from the eyeballs is asked, “Are you OK?” and one who has nearly been ripped apart alive in the last 30 seconds quips, “You’re saying this isn’t attractive looking?” Tell me, if everyone you knew were getting pulverized, would you pause to make a sarcastic crack about Garfield?
The movie starts intriguingly, with video that carries sinister-looking date and time stamps and warnings that it was captured by the government in connection with a mysterious case called “Cloverfield.” The video was shot by a young guy clowning around, taping random moments from a party in Manhattan. For 10 minutes, a Blair Witchy uneasiness builds. Something is about to happen.
Instead, we get 10 more minutes of filler as various partygoers wander in front of the camera to say nothing much. Apparently a couple of them had sex, but in the context of what’s coming, this information matters about as much as whether people like your new haircut on Judgment Day.
There’s a sound like an earthquake, someone flips on the TV and it turns out a tanker has capsized in New York Harbor. So everyone runs into the street and – zammo! – the Statue of Liberty’s head lands at their feet.
That image alone is all you need to have a hit movie, and there’s lots more horrifying stuff to come – fires and tumbling buildings and yellowy plumes of dust, all of it bathed in an eerie, sickening mood. The entire movie consists of the found tape shot by people fleeing in terror, and the you-are-there-ness of the images is convincing.
Which is a deeply unpleasant feeling. We’ve seen a chunk of this city destroyed, see it again frequently in our imaginations. It isn’t fun. The more a movie about the subject looks like documentary footage and the less it looks like a fantasy, the less amusing it is.
“Cloverfield” doesn’t understand the first rule of disaster adventures – call it Will Smith’s Law. Human suffering isn’t supposed to be the point but rather the dark backdrop to problem-solving and fighting back, as in “Independence Day” and “I Am Legend.”
Even the visuals, impressive as they are – an image of a bomber going to work is particularly searing – mostly just slap a new coat of paint on ideas borrowed from “Starship Troopers” or “The Hot Zone.” (I won’t describe the monster, since seeing what it is and what it does is the only point to the movie.)
Writing does matter, even in an effects extravaganza, because scenes that rattle the visual part of your brain are being ridiculed by the reasoning part.
Why does everyone say things like “Let’s get the hell out of Manhattan,” if the very first thing they have learned about the beast from the harbor is that it’s amphibious?
If there were a creature as big as the Chrysler Building and as bad-tempered as Rosie O’Donnell rumbling through the streets, would you make a dash to the Brooklyn Bridge or become acquainted with the nearest basement?
Why does everyone risk their lives going to a friend’s place to rescue her when they have no reason to believe she’s still there?
The black hole of the ending, moreover, ensures that you leave the theater feeling crabby instead of exhilarated.
“Cloverfield,” which runs barely 70 minutes before the credits, is a 10-minute trailer mummified by an hour of padding. The story is nonexistent (“People run from monster” is a log line, not a plot) and the characters are so flat and interchangeable that they might as well be called Catalog Models One Through Six.
Disaster movies typically avoid the phoniness of an all-pretty-people world by casting a cross-section – this is when Ernest Borgnine and Jeff Goldblum’s phones start ringing. If we were told that the characters were a gang of actors or models, fine, but the movie doesn’t dare. Because then we’d be cheering for the monster.
CLOVERFIELD
Godzilcha.
Running time: 84 minutes. Rated PG-13 (violence, terror, disturbing images). At the E-Walk, the Lincoln Square, the Orpheum, others.