Seeing CLOVERFIELD has put me in an unusual position: I'm a little wary of saying anything about it. That's partly because I felt such unabashed enthusiasm and emotion for it -- it made me feel a monster movie again the way I felt them as a very young child (something uncommon in my adult experience, to say the least) -- and partly because I know the party stuff at the beginning is going to seem twice as long the next time I see it.I know it has its faults, but they're fairly minor when one considers how well it reflects its time and America's post-9/11 mind-set of confusion and powerlessness. Time may well prove it to be, as Steve Bissette has already pronounced on his MYRANT blog, the American counterbalance to Japan's trauma-purging GOJIRA. The way the Japanese characters of GOJIRA regard its monster with almost reverent awe, and the noble ways in which they accept death, respect their dead, and band together for reconstruction, are not found in CLOVERFIELD, which is more of a disorienting whirl of action and chaos and military might, in which the characters -- already technologically distanced from reality -- haven't the social or spiritual reservoirs to cope with such a catastrophe.
I can't think of anything that the film borrows that it doesn't improve upon: the "found footage" origins and harrowing dropped camera realism of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, the grainy camcorded textures of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, every storytelling trick that Brian DePalma has called into service between SNAKE EYES and REDACTED. And it succeeds at reinventing the giant monster movie in ways that the American GODZILLA didn't (with the same tools at its disposal -- it's the movie that used the dropped camcorder view of the monster's attack as a throwaway shot!), as well as incorporating 9/11 imagery in more visceral ways than Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS or indeed the pre-9/11 INDEPENDENCE DAY. It's like the great idea that all of these movies had but failed to fully grasp, so archetypally perfect that one can easily imagine all the parodies to come. All the more reason to see it now, before its impact can be diminished.
In my heart of hearts, I have a creeping suspicion that CLOVERFIELD may be the most important horror movie (or horrifying movie) I've seen in a long time, maybe since THE EXORCIST or TAXI DRIVER or CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, because it gave me the same apocalyptic feeling those films did when I first saw them -- a sense that movies, as I knew them, would never be the same again.
