Cloverfield.

Click the "Early words on Cloverfield" and you'll see they've begun to segue into full-blown reviews, so here we go, starting with Grady Hendrix, who follows up on his first take in Twitch with a second in the New York Sun: "[W]ith great hype comes great expectations, and the question on the minds of every man, woman, and child infected by the Cloverfield campaign is: Does it live up to its marketing? The answer, in short, is no."

"Back in 2001, movie companies were rushing to cut images of the World Trade Center from movies like Men in Black II and People I Know," recalls Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "In 2008, a decapitated Statue of Liberty has become the primary marketing iconography for the movie that is 'tracking' to be the year's first bona fide blockbuster." But "the cheap and opportunistic Cloverfield suggests nothing so much as an earlier Abrams-authored disasterpiece, Armageddon, if it were rewritten by Mumblecore doyen Andrew Bujalski and shot on The Blair Witch Project's steady-shot-deficient handycam."

Updated through 1/21..

"After months of annoying PR stunts, trailers devoid of titles and titles devoid of context, questions about the actual quality of the damn thing almost seemed irrelevant," writes the Reeler. "Now that it's here, the outer layers of producer JJ Abrams's commercial machine have fallen to the wayside and we can see the final product as it is: a clunky, occasionally frightening monster-takes-Manhattan adventure that's hardly worth all the presumptuous hype."

"Finding out that Cloverfield isn't nearly as clever as its epic advertising doesn't detract from Abrams's ability to make the movie look very appealing, but another revelation emerges when comparing the commercial to the final product," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "With 9/11 parallels all over this thing, if Cloverfield were pumped up for what it is, it probably wouldn't sell."

"[E]ven though Cloverfield isn't the Godzilla-for-the-YouTube-generation picture that everyone may have been hoping for, it's still a terrific movie, filled with spectacle and a surprising amount of humor, which makes up for its lack of terror or emotional impact," writes Peter Hartlaub in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Despite its indie-flavored shooting style, first-rate visual effects, reasonable intensity factor, nihilistic attitude and post-9/11 anxiety overlay, this punchy sci-fier is, in the end, not much different from all the marauding creature features that have come before it," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy.

Updates: At Fear.net, Scott Weinberg is "very happy to report that not only is Cloverfield a very good monster movie, but it represents a very welcome advance for the aged sub-genre. Between this flick and the Korean import The Host, one can't help but enjoy the mega-monster resurgence we're being treated to. Enjoy it now... before all the chintzy copycats show up."

Much of the film appears overly familiar to Richard Corliss, but there does seem to be one fresh innovation: "Earlier, we saw the monster shedding parasites that had attached themselves to its hide like barnacles. These dog-size, cricket-faced, crablike creatures can bound like kangaroos, stick to ceilings and attack people without so much as a 'Boo!'" Also in Time, Rebecca Winters Keegan talks with Abrams.

"Cloverfield is structured like a latter-day porno, complete with blandly fresh bodies, ugly video aesthetic, and full-on facial climax, though it plays most disquietingly as a snuff film concocted by PG-13-minded eggheads possessed of a shallow obsession with 'post-9/11' allegory," writes Keith Uhlich at UGO.

"Despite a first reel entirely devoted to establishing characters, Cloverfield is basically a line-'em-up, pick-'em-off horror movie that's effective without being either viscerally frightening or emotionally moving," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "Watching it is like going through a car wash: You come out of it thoroughly Cloverfield-ized, but essentially unchanged."

Nick Schager at Slant: "'It's about moments, man. That's all that matters,' muses Jason, and Cloverfield strictly adheres to that belief. What it doesn't ultimately do, however, is make those individual moments coalesce into something more than just a loud, frantic, hollow gimmick."

"Cloverfield never stops to identify the why, whence, or whereto of its rampaging meanie - this relentless thriller stops for nothing - but as for what to call it, behold... al-Qaedzilla!" yelps Nathan Lee in the Voice. "And how delicious that it comes to feast on the neo-yuppies.... Coupled with Kevin Stitt's complex cutting, Cloverfield is a sustained triumph of expanding and contracting perspectives, its whip-pans from human-scale panic to skyscraper-toppling spectacle raising the bar set by Spielberg's War of the Worlds - if not Sokurov's Russian Ark. The mechanism is the message in Cloverfield, a movie so aluminum-sleek, ultra-portable, and itsy-bitsy sexy, it's amazing Steve Jobs didn't pull it out of an envelope at Macworld."

"[I]ts decision to focus on ground-level humanism rather than epic disaster is what separates it from the pack," writes Eric Alt for Premiere. He also draws parallels with Frank Darabont's The Mist.

Updates, 1/18: "Like Cloverfield itself, this new monster is nothing more than a blunt instrument designed to smash and grab without Freudian complexity or political critique, despite the tacky allusions to Sept 11," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Like too many big-studio productions, Cloverfield works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt. Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm."

"Maybe we're supposed to give Abrams and [director Matt] Reeves extra points for cleverness, for the way they've adapted traditional narrative into YouTube-style storytelling, using seemingly homegrown video footage to heighten the sense of immediacy," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "But we've already seen a far more effective version of that approach in Brian De Palma's Iraq war drama Redacted, and George Romero's upcoming Diary of the Dead makes use of some similar techniques. It's no longer good enough to be among the first; you have to be an effective storyteller, too, and that's where Reeves, [screenwriter Drew] Goddard and Abrams fail."

"Cloverfield is adept at wringing maximum suspense and might have reached the heights of the Korean monster film The Host but for the limitations of the camcorder ploy," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times. "While it injects the film with a run-and-gun urgency, the device grows tiresome and ultimately leaves the film shortchanged."

"At one point, a solider is asked what the monster is," notes Bradley Steinbacher in the Stranger. "'We don't know,' he replies, 'but it's winning.' That's Cloverfield right there, and it's a hell of a lot of fun to watch."

The AV Club's Keith Phipps finds it "absolutely terrifying, and it's all the more effective for the way it lets viewers spend time getting to know the terrified stars, and the emotions and regrets behind their seemingly futile efforts to survive." Grade: A-

"[A]ll in all, it is an effective film, deploying its special effects well and never breaking the illusion that it is all happening as we see it," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "One question, which you can answer for me after you see the film: Given the nature of the opening government announcement, how did the camera survive?"

"Cloverfield is a kick," blogs David Edelstein. "The kid in you might crave a more objective view of the creature - not to mention the catharsis that comes from watching science and the military collaborate to bring the monster down, etc. That said, we've sat through that kind of movie again and again, but we've never sat through anything with Cloverfield's subjective sting. You'd have to be tougher than I was not to be blown sideways by it."

Online viewing tip. Vulture cuts together two minutes of man-on-the-street reactions. Good stuff!

"The biggest surprise about Cloverfield... is that for the first time in recent memory (if not ever), a January release doesn't royally suck," writes Aaron Dobbs. "[O]ne reason Cloverfield is so good is because it remains thoroughly gripping even though none of the big plot 'twists' really come as much of a surprise."

Updates, 1/19: "For a film that allegedly cost only 30 per cent more than Chris Tucker got for Rush Hour 3, Matt Reeves's first feature since The Pallbearer (you read that correctly) looks and sounds remarkable," writes Adam Nayman at Eye Weekly. "But - and it's a big but, I cannot lie - there's something cynical and even objectionable in the way these filmmakers are playing off collective memories of 9/11, as if a B-movie scenario about a gigantic, otherworldly beastie laying waste to a city were an acceptable allegory for a real-world act of terrorism."

"But while the Manhattan setting seems crucial to Cloverfield, I also found myself thinking, at least during one or two key moments, about the war in Iraq," writes Chuck Tryon. "During one key scene late in the film, Rob Hawkins confides to the camera that he and some of the other survivors are 'caught in the middle,' trapped between the unknowable, unpredictable, and utterly amorphous monster and the US military attempts to contain it. And, of course, the battle itself is unwinnable. During the attack on Manhattan, smaller monsters - possibly recalling terrorist cells - splinter off of the main monster, and all of the attempts to bomb the enemy into submission seem doomed to failure and, in fact, quite often endanger civilians, despite the best intentions of the military itself (in retrospect, I may be over-reading here)."

Update, 1/21: At culturemonkey, Gerry Canavan and Co "found ourselves wrestling with the question of the origins of apocalyptic fantasy, why these sorts of productions are so very popular. We basically hit upon five overlapping and sometimes contradictory motivations."

Posted by dwhudson at January 17, 2008 8:26 AM