Much like King Kong (last time I mention it for a while, I promise), Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) is another film that divided audiences. Some found the hand-held camera nauseating, others described it as "gimmickry" or "YouTube storytelling" (quotes culled from Rotten Tomatoes, cba to fully reference them), or as just another way of telling a traditional narrative. The characters picked up a lot of slack, mostly for being boring yuppies with bad decision-making skills. Get your brains in gear, reviewers.
The most important thing to realise about Cloverfield is that it's not really about the boring New York yuppies. Cloverfield is about the wider picture, of which we get only the tiniest of glimpses: we are locked, from start to finish, into the literal view of ordinary civilians, and we know just the smallest amount more than they (thanks to the incredibly successful viral campaign). We may follow these people for the duration of the film, but essentially they serve as one small perspective on a much larger event. Criticisms that it "lacks tension" are deflected when looked at like this: horror is at its most effective when it is left to our imagination, and Cloverfield works in this same way. The Rob/Beth narrative may not be fantastic or tense, but the glimpses we do get of New York, of the lives of other civilians, of the actions of the military compensate fully. Take for instance the opening title that frames the footage as military evidence. It poses so many questions - what is the state of the US currently? Is the monster still alive? Did it win? Are there other such stories to be told? It expands the story hugely, but crucially this expansion happens only in our imaginations. We are able to create a far more cohesive world than the filmmakers could have, even if the film took a broader view of events.
For this reason Cloverfield is so much more than a "traditional narrative". Keeping the audience in a position of ignorance is fundamentally different from showing the wider picture with different angles and perspectives. Cloverfield doesn't really have an ending. The movie finishes when the camera is lost beneath a collapsed bridge, and while this concludes the Rob/Beth narrative, the story of the monster, which is the main narrative, is far from finished. The hand-held camera format can successfully be accused of "gimmickry" at times - see recent release Project X - but here it is just not the case.
I would go so far as to argue that because the 'monster narrative' is the real core of the film, it doesn't matter that the Rob/Beth narrative isn't that great. The characters are mostly boring, they're a homogeneous bunch taken from a section of society with which most of the audience would have little sympathy with: they're rich, pretty and self-absorbed. Only the Lizzy Caplan character has anything remotely interesting about her. What this serves to do, however, is increase the verisimilitude of the film. It is precisely because they're so mundane that it works - their lack of wit, their irrational decision-making and general helplessness makes them feel like normal people. In subservience to the 'monster narrative' it is more important that the characters are believable New Yorkers than fascinating people. If anything, it is good that the focus is on the wider events; if the 'monster narrative', a nuanced and beguiling character narrative and the audience assimilation into the film through the immediacy of the hand-held camera were all woven together it may well be that Cloverfield would be too cluttered, and the least important is the character narrative.
Had the film been shot like a normal film, yet kept the same level of audience ignorance, it would have been much less effective. We would get impatient, and start wondering why we're not being given any context. Then, when the characters die at the end and the film finishes it would feel like a con. The restrictions would seem incredibly arbitrary and frustrating. Setting Cloverfield up as camcorder footage circumvents this issue entirely - we are happy to accept this as how the film works, and it makes sense that we are left in the dark on the events unfolding in wider New York.
It is worth mentioning that Cloverfield has a 77% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so it was a far from reviled film. It was praised for the level of immersion and the spectacular set-pieces, but I felt that there is a general under-appreciation of how ably it uses the hand-held format. Hopefully this piece provides a counterpoint.
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