For Cloverfield, this creative team spends way too much time setting up characters that we don’t really care about, and far too little time with the creature and its destruction. Personally, I liked the creature far more than the humans. The monster looked very cool and it seemed able to spawn little winged creatures (bat-like tarantulas with lethal bites) that provided the film with one truly scary attack in the subway.
But we are given no information about what the creature is, where it might be from, or any speculation at all about it. Abrams has said that he wanted to create an American monster movie that would provide a legendary figure like Godzilla and be a metaphor for our times. Well his nameless beast does neither.
Godzilla had personality! You can make fun of the fact that he was a man in a rubber suit, but that man in the rubber suit gave Godzilla a personality, just like King Kong had a personality. A monster without some kind of identity will never become legendary. As for the notion of a metaphor – what, America is destroying itself? A metaphor for 9/11? Okay, maybe that works, but not very well.
This film seems so designed for an audience that’s plugged into the web, electronics and itself that there’s no humanity in sight. Those who liked the film were probably texting their friends while the movie was still going on. But for me, Cloverfield has about as much human interest and suspense as an episode of survivor.
After seeing Cloverfield, I was so frustrated and disappointed that I felt like I needed a palate cleanser. I wanted to immediately go home and watch South Korea’s The Host. Now there’s a great, new monster movie. We see the creature early on and in broad daylight. It serves as a potent social and political metaphor for Korea.
We come to care deeply for the characters. And through the course of the film we learn how the creature came about, what it is doing, and how it lives. If you love monster movies and start to feel the urge to see Cloverfield, I urge you to go rent The Host instead. Or at the very least, have The Host waiting for you at home for when you come back from Cloverfield feeling let down.
Cloverfield (rated PG-13 for violence, terror, and disturbing images) gets a 10 for its monster but a 2 for everything else. The subway attack and a few revealing scenes of the creature (especially as he moves in for a kill) got my hopes up that the film would be better. But the filmmakers kept going back to their stupid humans and bad camerawork. - Full Cloverfield review at KPBS
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