Cloverfield

James and I saw this movie a couple weeks ago, and I'm still thinking about it. I can't say why, exactly, since it's not like it has any deep meaning or anything. But something about it is compelling.

It's your basic monster-attacks-New York movie, with lots of destruction and mass hysteria. (And why do monsters only seem to attack New York? Why not Baltimore or DC or Boston? Or heck, LA or Seattle? Maybe it's because those cities don't have iconic structures for the monster to destroy--only in NY can it rip off the head of the Statue of Liberty and throw it at people. That must be it.) The difference with this movie is that it's all told from the first-person perspective of a small group of friends.

It's very much the "Blair Monster Project," a hand-held camcorder being the only camera. The premise is that a group of friends is having a farewell party for a friend moving to Japan (small nod to Godzilla there), and someone is going around with the camera recording farewell messages when the monster attacks. Another layer is added because the party is being taped over the recording of the Japan guy's weekend with the girl he's loved forever, so every once in a while some of that recording will pop up in the middle of all the monster chaos.

This format makes it so we don't have any real context for the events. The introduction says only that this camera and tape were found in the destruction zone, so we know that Manhattan has been destroyed. We don't get any back-story on the monster or any neat wrap-up at the end. We don't get the standard monster-movie intro where some unlucky extra stumbles upon the monster in its natural habitat and somehow unwittingly brings it back to New York. We don't see the top-secret military project that created/discovered the monster or the asteroid carrying the monster hit the earth. We don't see the president and his advisers arguing over what to do. There's no previously misunderstood expert who comes in and saves the day. So maybe what makes this so interesting is that it's a movie very much embedded in the monster-movie cliche, but it doesn't use most of the cliches within that genre.

Anyway, that's probably way too much analysis for a movie that really isn't that deep. The characters are flat, the plot simple. But maybe that's what keeps me thinking about it--if it's really that shallow, why did I like it so much? That J. J. Abrams is a genius.

Oh, and in case anyone's wondering, there is a little sound byte at the end of the credits that, when you play it backwards, sounds like "It's still alive" or "We're still alive." Apparently it's on YouTube. I can't imagine they'd make a sequel, though.