The Deconstructionist: Cloverfailed
The Giant Parasites Weren’t The Only Thing In This Movie That Sucked.
Do you know what terrified me about the movie Cloverfield? It wasn’t the monster, although the giant gray fish-bat thingy and its carnivorous lice were spectacular. (The lice are interesting because they, we assume, evolved to feed off of a giant fish-bat that was to them the same relative size as, oh, the state of Rhode Island * is to us, but then instantly changed their diet to include mammals that were only slightly larger than them. This is kind of like deer ticks suddenly deciding to change their diet from blood to silver-dollar pancakes.)
No, what frightened me about Cloverfield was its success. Cloverfield is many things- imaginative, timely, and I would go so far as to say well-crafted (saying so is a stretch -- like imagining a tick eating a pancake), but beyond all this, at its heart, Cloverfield is almost unbearably cynical, even more so, perhaps, than the other American Godzilla remake. The 90’s Godzilla at least embraced the principal behind Godzilla - a giant monster making humans pay like the bitches we are for all that we have ever done- sort of a 500-foot tall Michael Myers crashing our global teenage gropefest that is our culture. You get the idea that the people behind the 90’s Godzilla liked Godzilla movies, even if it was beyond their grasp to make a good one.
But Cloverfield sullies this concept by never being anything more than a marketing engine, a viral experiment to get people in to see a movie that was made on the cheap, and playing every emotion it can lay hold of in the effort. It may be the best-made bad movie I’ve ever seen, but ultimately it is a hollow exercise and I felt cheapened afterwards. I felt like a telemarketer had just taken $10.00 from me by playing on my love of Godzilla:
“You care about giant reptiles that are manifestations of humanity’s animus, don’t you, Mr. Weir?”
“Of course I do!”
“Then how many tickets can I put you down for? And how about some nachos and lemonade? Giant angry monsters are counting on you!”
The trouble with the above imaginary exchange is the telemarketer clearly knows something about how and why people are drawn to monster movies, and indeed, certain kinds of horror/disaster films in general. Viewers are looking for more than simply a scare or an intense experience, they want to care about something, and if your main characters are devoid of any human interest and emotion, as they are in Cloverfied (indeed, in may movies of the type) then let us care about the monster.
We care about Godzilla - we have always cared about him, even before he started dancing and had a cute baby- because he represents something we can relate to. What he represents has often changed, ranging from a manifestation of our best nature to a terrible result of the worst of humanity, but always there was a connection. We had either created Godzilla or we had called upon him. In the twisting, convoluted world of Japanese cinema, the two were often the same, and Godzilla would save us even as he destroyed us.
In 2004, Japanese’s filmmaker Shūsuke Kaneko rebooted Godzilla in the excellent film Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. In this incarnation, “Godzilla is not only mutated by the atomic bomb, he is also described as an incarnation of those killed or who were left to die at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Pacific War”. Now that’s a monster. That is a creature with a purpose. Huge ideas spring up all around him- such as do we as humans have the right to struggle against the evil we create? And if we do, is success possible?
That’s some powerful shit, right there.
The Cloverfield monster, by contrast and by design, isn’t representing anything except the irrationality of the terrible. The creature doesn’t even have a name. His job is to demonstrate that life is fragile and everything could collapse at any moment, and when it does, there’s no escaping it, because it will send lice down into the subway tunnels after you.
But we know this. Framing a monster movie around such a thing is like making a movie about cancer and how it may happen to you and the unpleasantness that will occur soon thereafter.
There are movies about cancer, of course, and they are made in the hopes that audiences will care about the people who are dealing with the reality of the disease. But we are not supposed to care about the people in Cloverfield. They are weak actors who have been given little to say and even less to do. Cloverfield is in a sense, the experience of watching only the last hour of Titanic, without all that went before. The screen is filled with strangers who are drowning spectacularly. You don’t know who they are, and nothing distinguishes anyone from the rest. Cloverfield moves from ill conceived to outright offensive with its many September 11th references. I don’t need that moment recreated in a way that deprives it of all humanity. I don’t need to see bad actors stumbling down a city street chased by a cloud of swirling dust in attempts to get me emotionally involved in a monster movie that fails at every other attempt to engage me.
In the end the strongest emotion this film conjured up in me was disappointment. Perhaps I am failing to see the big picture. The Cloverfield monster represented a kind of inevitability, the instability of all of life and progress in the face of entropy. This film, with its hollow, meaningless fury, may embody that ideal better than anything it itself contains. If I look at it with those glasses, the whole thing approaches art, but it’s probably just my own efforts to apply meaning to a blank empty thing that was really only made to get my $10.00.
The Deconstructionist with Gordon Weir should leave the film reviews to this guy.
* That’s for you, EBC