fresh movie reviews and yum cha daily

dir: Matt Reeves
Do you think at least one of us will make it into the sequel?
Disaster movies seem kinda superfluous in this day and age. Even major cities suffering horrendous destruction hasn’t been a rare occurrence (obviously) in, let’s say, the last decade or so. And with war, arbitrary death and ‘splosions being common in the less white parts of the world, getting to enjoy a film where a nebulous horror visits destruction upon hapless urban sophisticates seems like a pointless indulgence.

Of course, by that logic, practically no films have any moral justification for their existence at any time. And then where would I be? Writing reviews of plays and the goddamn opera? I’d have even less people reading my reviews. How do you get less than zero again? Okay, negative numbers. I’d have negative numbers of readers reading my reviews, which, if I’ve got the temporal mechanics right, would mean that the reviews would be being unread by increasing numbers of non-existent anti-matter readers.

Then there’d be some kind of tear in the fabric of space-time, and I’d be responsible for damning the universe to non-existence as it turned itself catastrophically inside out.

Who are you to say that it isn’t feasible? Hey, according to string theory, any point of time and/or matter could be existing simultaneously in 26 different dimensions. So there. Anything’s possible.

Anything’s possible even down to the possibility that someone could actually make a decent monster / disaster movie even now in this day and age. Cloverfield, surprising the hell out of me, is just such a flick.

It is a monster movie shown entirely from the point of view of a guy holding a camera. As in, one of the characters is filming events at all times, and the story is told from his point of view. As contrived as this must seem, this does mean the story is told from a first-person perspective.

So if the film is likened to a rollercoaster ride, it’s most similar to one of those rides like at the Melbourne Aquarium or at theme parks where, regardless of the overall premise, monsters or just danger in general looms out directly at you, the viewer, and not at characters you would be observing from a third-person perspective.

Allied with the fact that the movie has the pervasive discomforting effect of being filmed on a hand-held camera (without Steadycam stabilisation) as well, and it turns it into a far more visceral experience than you’d expect.

Of course, if you’re (like I’ve been known to in the past) one of those people who perpetually bitches about shaky-cam movies where the action looks like it was filmed by crack addicted monkeys for crack addict monkeys, you could find this flick far too annoying to enjoy.

My words of advice and wisdom regarding the watching of this (and any other of those flicks) is that sitting further back in the theatre certainly aids one’s potential enjoyment. Still, the overall impact is to make the viewer feel pretty worn by the time the credits roll, regardless of where you’re sitting.

The movie opens as if it is part of a military record, with designations and warnings about duplication. Then, inexplicably, the footage is of a guy, Rob (Michael Stahl-David), filming a woman, Beth (Odette Yustman) who’s still sleeping off a night of what we can only presume was vigorous and thoroughly satisfying sex. These are young, healthy looking Manhattanites after all.

The conversation covers the banalities of what they want to spend the day doing. Talk turns to visiting Coney Island, something which Beth has never done thus far.

The scene then cuts to a month later, where a woman, Lily (Jessica Lucas) is trying to impress upon her boyfriend Jason (Mike Vogel), the importance of using the camera properly to film people giving testimonials at a party later that night in Rob’s honour. Rob is leaving for Japan, and the party is his farewell. The camera image keeps cutting back and forth between the present and the day at Coney Island Rob and Beth were enjoying.

Jason palms off the job to Rob’s best friend Hud (T.J. Miller), who gets to hold the camera for most of the rest of the film.

At this point, you could be forgiven for praying that a monster start killing these attractive, loft-living, Village Voice reading urban sophisticates right about now. The thing is, though, since we’ll be following them specifically in whatever follows, it’s important for us to know a bit about them in order to care if they live or die.

No matter how unlikely such empathy is likely to be.

The party goes on, and underlying tensions rise to the surface as a lot of high-school shenanigans and soap opera shit gets ladled out. The upshot is that Rob and Beth have some tension, she leaves, and then Hud, with the camera (and whilst getting drunk) alternately hassles people for testimonials about Rob’s overall wonderfulness and also tries to interpose himself in the action as the group of friends nut out the details of what happened between Rob and Beth.

He also clumsily tries to pick up Marlena (Lizzy Caplan), who correctly senses that a guy hassling you with a camera is likely to be someone you eventually have to get a restraining order against once the stalking begins in earnest.

Thankfully, blissfully, an earthquake or explosion rocks New York, and the whole tone of the movie shifts as these people, remembering the towers that fell a few years ago, try to figure out what’s going on.

Explosions start to rock the city, and a barely glimpsed something starts raining destruction upon the metropolis. As a final insult to these self-important people, the head of their patron deity, the Statue of Liberty, is flung casually across the city, prompting Hud to scream “OHMYGOD OHMYGOD” into the camera continuously.

Our main characters aren’t the protagonists in the sense that they have the task of finding out what’s going on and stopping the carnage with a witty quip, a magical piece of technology or by bridging the gap between two alien species. They’re just trying to survive.

The mad dash for safety is interrupted by slightly more information about the menace menacing Manhattan, but the truth is they’re just trying to survive whatever fate throws at them. What do origins matter when there’s a thousand different ways for you to die in a city under siege, and when a 100 foot monster, red in tooth and claw, could be chomping on you at any given moment?

And the monster itself, whether the product of laboratory, alien invasion, bad breeding, or a gigantic Courtney Love gone mad from drug withdrawal tearing through the city, does it really matter? All you need to know is how destructive, how terrifying, how unstoppable the thing is. And how long you’re going to survive.

But for some people surviving just isn’t enough. Rob decides he’s going to scurry across town avoiding the many potentials for death in order to find Beth, who is seriously wounded somewhere. Rob’s friends try to dissuade him, but, like the old line goes, love is stronger than death.

It is a continual, ceaseless, exhausting adventure. It rarely relents, and it manages to be consistently engaging and outright terrifying in some bits. Being filmed on video means that the special effects are cheaper to produce, but it also means that for what is a relatively low budget monster flick ($25 million), more money can be spent on other elements, like the sound design and getting the destruction to look just right. You know, just in case you forgot what 9/11 looked like.

The fact that the actors are unknowns, and that they don’t get the time to make grand speeches or to have stupid arguments, also helps a lot with the suspension of disbelief. As annoying as Hud is, every one of these films that has a group of people trying to survive against the odds, and has to have an annoying guy (Franklin in Texas Chain Saw Massacre, PTE Hudson in Aliens), and he’s relatively tame in comparison.

It helps that the flick isn’t long enough to outstay its welcome, and that, ultimately, what the monster/monsters is/are and what’s going on is less important than us wanting the protagonists to survive. There are plenty of ways they could have turned this into the shitty, generic flicks that have preceded it, so I have to commend the people involved in resisting the impulses that usually damn these flicks to the superfluous and pointless bin that they belong in.

Stand out sections involve a mad dash through a subway tunnel whilst being pursued by some nasty critters (the reveal is particularly strong: you’ll know what I mean when you see it), a trip across one building to another building which is in the process of falling down, and the whole shit-scared aesthetic that permeates everything. All I’ll say about the ending is that it is perfectly in keeping with the rest of the movie, and that it could not have been more appropriate. But, goddamn, does it show how different this is from any flick like the recent Godzilla flick, Armageddon, Day After Tomorrow or any other movie of this ilk that you can care to mention.

This is a new era, or so they say. After seeing the destruction of a major section of New York back in 2001, the possibility that people will see and have to endure catastrophe even in the heart of one of the biggest cities on the planet is no longer as far-fetched in the consciousness or purely the stuff of disaster movies.

The film’s overarching theme is that surviving isn’t enough; that trying to save the people you love can still seem as important or as possible to you even when you’re confronted by a terrifying monster capable of destroying everything you’ve ever known.

You know, because like the man said, all you need is love.

Yeah, that’ll save you.

7 times saying “I don’t feel well” as a precursor to what happens next has to rank as one of the understatements of the new millennium out of 10

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“What is that thing?”
- I don't know, but whatever it is, it's winning.” - Cloverfield.