Thanks to the magic of the special feature listed on the packaging of countless bare-bones DVD releases as “scene selection” I am currently watching Cloverfield sans its opening twenty minutes. The movie had been steadily growing on me since I first saw it a little less than a year ago; it’s not unlike The Mist in that regard, but oddly it is unlike I Am Legend, which ending aside I preferred to the other two entries in Winter ’07-’08’s apocalyptic monster movie festival at the time but since find myself largely uninterested in revisiting. My guess, and I think I’ve said this before, is that it’s because I’m a monster man at heart, and IAL‘s critters were the weakest part of that movie while the monsters in Cloverfield and The Mist were highlights.

Anyway, the destruction of Manhattan by the bastard offspring of Lovecraft and Toho is just as awe-inspiring and as soul-crushing as I remember it being. I’m not going to say it’s a relentless grinding down of your nerves, because there’s the fanservice “girl knows about Superman” humor in the tunnel scene, but it’s grim and it plays those 9/11 notes expertly. Is it the best giant-monster movie I’ve ever seen? You bet. I’d already had a hunch it might end up on my all-time favorites list the next time I update it, and so far…yep. The stuff that I like here is really the kind of stuff I like, you know?

But then there’s the stuff I don’t like, and in skipping ahead to the moment where the excrement hits the air conditioning I stumbled across exactly what that is. Behold the final line spoken by one of our partygoers before the attack begins:

You gotta learn to forget the world and hang on to the people you care about the most.

Also?

In all seriousness, it’s not even that I disagree with the sentiment. In fact that’s pretty much how I’m living my life these days! It’s just that nothing about how it’s expressed throughout the movie rises above the most predictable, clichéd ways of doing so. Lizzy Caplan excepted, the performances don’t help either. I’m struck in this re-watching by how one-note lead actor Michael Stahl-David’s performance is; it seems like he based his character’s reaction to trauma solely on what he’s seen such things look and sound like in the movies. Compare and contrast with the three actors in The Blair Witch Project, which I also re-watched recently, and, well, there isn’t any comparison. The special effects show a lot more seams on the small screen too, oddly enough, I guess because it’s easier for the eye to parse the constantly moving camera.

Good movie anyway. Heck, I’m leaning toward great movie anyway.

Old stuff on Cloverfield here, here, and here.

PS: The girl regaining consciousness with a “hey” is still totally hilariously awful.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 8:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.