Cloverfield

Sometimes the idea of a movie can transform the experience of watching it, and sometimes only on remembering it. The challenge is to have ideas that are not only clever and appear so, but which actually make good, effective films that matter.

I went into this thinking that it would be an evolution of "Transformers." That film worked for me, and worked in ways that were beyond anything I had seen. Sure the story was dumb and the very idea of the robots was childish. But the way the film was put together was a bit astonishing. In old movies, if there was a monster destroying a building, well then you saw the building being destroyed as if you were a placid god in the sky somewhere. With Transformers, you never really saw things this way. You saw them as if you were an observer threatened by and involved in the action. You were running, avoiding, occasionally glancing and sometimes accidentally seeing part of what was happening.

It was new, marvelous. But we always knew the cameras were not associated with humans, at least not the ones on screen. The idea was to trick us into adopting the disembodied cameras we always accepted and allowed us, the audience to be threatened, to be there.

Now this. Some of the effects are the same. At least in the beginning of the disaster, we only partially see what is happening. And there are many times when the camera is unsteady. But I got the impression that although the camera was handled by a panicked character, we always saw more than he would have. The camera was always where we would have wanted it, arranged to increase the dramatic effect.

Transformers was silly and we could assault it. Cloverfield was supposedly real and it assaulted us. That makes the deliberation of camera a whole different thing. Its control is external to what's happening. We do realize this without thinking about it, and it diffuses the terror and changes it to spectacle. This folding technique only works when you have the commitment of the audience. They thought they would get it with the teen soap opera at the beginning. Didn't work for me.

It would have worked better if she hadn't ASKED to be rescued.

Nice bridge though.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.