Cloverfield

So Smitty and I, along with a few others, took in Cloverfield last night. GOOD TIMES. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

If you haven't heard, this... is a monster movie. Pretty much Godzilla... but not... see, Godzilla (Roland Emmerich's version) sucked and this movie is the exact opposite of that. IT ROCKED. If you're a Godzilla fan, as I am, and you were as horribly disappointed with that movie when it came out as I was, Cloverfield will make you disappointed in Godzilla even more. Don't get me wrong, Godzilla could never be Cloverfield; Godzilla requires back story and explanation, something Cloverfield specifically avoids, but when it comes to smashing and killing, the Cloverfield monster shows Emmerich how it should have been done.

Cloverfield is shot, Blair Witch style, with a Handycam basically attached to a dude's head while he chronicles the attack of a giant creature on Manhattan. The opening premise is that this guy is leaving his posh New York digs and upscale "all too-good-looking-to-be-true" friends for a VP job in Japan. The friends are sending him off in style with a bash, and are recording "tributes" to him when, basically, mayhem in the form of a 35 story monstrosity appears and begins tearin' shit up. Our Abercrombie model Japanese VP has a love affair with this chic (who, of course, is uber hot as well), which serves as the impetus for him and a group of his friends to venture through the city to find her despite the beast that is destroying everything in its path. His buddy keeps filming because, well, he's gotta do something... and besides, if they all die, he figures someone should tell their story. As a person sitting in the theater, you're watching the footage basically raw, with the opening scene explaining that you're witnessing footage recovered from the scene that is now classified Defense Department Property.

If you're a person who needs explanations, you'll leave Cloverfield very unsatisfied, at least from that perspective. Where the monster comes from, whether or not the characters live, did they kill the thing in the end... that isn't what this movie is about. There is no music, no sound track, just a group of 20-somethings trying to make their way through the carnage. Quite honestly, for movie buffs this is a refreshing piece of work. No spoon fed explanations from some scientist who happens to have an on-the-mark theory of the beast's origins based upon his status as the world's foremost authority on North African crotch crickets, no "oh look what I found" contrived diary from a long dead explorer who explains the monster just before the hero figures out how to defeat it... just 4 scared people trying to find a friend while filming a letter form home with a digital 8; and some great CGI. Plus, the Military takes action in this movie, and we're not talking pot shots. They BRING IT; Full out, no prisoners, military strike stuff. The kind of thing the director's in other films don't do, precisely because they always want the downfall of the creature to be more meaningful, or because the hero always needs to have some simple, but initially overlooked, insight that does the trick. Here, they bomb the fucker, just like you know we'd do in real life. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.