Cloverfield

The high-concept tag for Cloverfield — The Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla — doesn't sound like a winning formula. Still I can envision the pitch by Lost producer J.J. Abrams: "No, really! It'll work. The handheld thing keeps the shoots small — and small is cheap. No stars, also cheap. Minimal promo to prevent creature-fatigue, very cheap. Just classic horror. The video makes it disorienting, claustrophobic, intimate intense. We put the money into blood, special effects and good CGI, not cheap, but cheaper than actually, y'know, destroying Manhattan."

Also cheaper than having Will Smith save the planet again, as it happens.

Having reportedly come in for about $25 million, Cloverfield is hardly the shoestring project that Blair Witch was. Still, it illustrates the way constraint sometimes provokes imagination to exponential efficiencies. Another illustration of this would be 9/11, whereupon a relative handful with chump change and box cutters dealt a staggering blow to nation with a trillion-dollar air force. Cloverfield, it now seems, will be a cinematic phenomenon (having grossed its costs the first weekend), partly because it traffics rather cathartically in the PTSD imagery of that historical nightmare. Also, it's brilliantly constructed by a team from the Lost stable — well written, well directed and edited with something like genius.

Some will have trepidations about the handheld format, and indeed, there is some risk of seasickness. But in fact, the jittery imagery is cinematically crisp and vivid, and the story so propulsive that most will get quickly roll with the jiggling effect. The authors wisely walk us gently into this unsteady world, making Cloverfield a self-explanatory text, like one of those novels that purports to be a found journal. It's introduced by a CIA label, identifying it as a having been found in a Manhattan park, and cataloguing the tape's sightings of something with the chillingly euphonious code designation "Cloverfield." (It's a street in the writer's neighborhood.) The video rolls, starting with the Rob Hawkins' (Michael Stahl-David) saccharine video of a day spent with the gorgeous Beth (Odette Yustman). But most of that day, mercifully, is lost, when Rob's buddies swipe the camera to film the Lower East Side party sending him off to Tokyo. Hud (T.J. Miller) mans the camera in hopes of getting babes to talk to him, as, in classic horror style, the party provides a calm interlude wherein we are introduced to the characters, the more to be horrified when the Bad Things start happening. Perversely, and brilliantly, Cloverfield sets us down among a bunch of twentysomething fratties — recent campus Republicans, it seems: affluent, reflexively selfish, endlessly entitled, insensitive, and yet mawkishly sentimental ("You're my number one dude, Rob!") — and the hotties who dig them. They're kids, still tethered to Mom by the cell phone. The news that one of their number has actually had sex recently sets the party agog. Rather soon one starts thinking: Cue monster, please.

Dead on time, "Cloverfield" arrives. The kids go up to the roof to check out the commotion, then large chunks of New York explode, burn and crumble. The party dissolves in a screaming stampede down the staircase, and from then on it's a breakneck scramble for life among the fratties and hotties — not all of whom (spoiler alert) will make it. Hud keeps filming and talking manically (sometimes hilariously) through the graphic carnage, because, as he explains, "Otherwise I might shit my pants."

Loose in the streets is a giant dinosaurish entity who crushes buildings while shedding legions of much smaller larvae which are themselves prodigiously ugly, vicious and deadly. The CGI is excellent so when we glimpse these things, fleetingly through the fleeing camera, it doesn't disappoint. And in the meantime we are indeed intimate with the believably terror-stricken New Yorkers, and claustrophobic in the dark and dust and the crannies that are resorted to for shelter. The movie's creators seem to have absorbed (besides 9/11 news footage) lessons from every creature-feature from Godzilla to Spielberg's War of the Worlds. So, no President comes on to explain and call for calm, no scientist argues for studying the creature. The ground-level perspective precludes these clichés. Instead we get Hud, breathless with headlong flight, answering a newcomer's questions about the big and small monsters:

Newcomer:What is that?
Hud:I don't know. Something really terrible.
Newcomer:What are those other things?
Hud:Something else. Also terrible.

A strange thing happens along the way — some of the lads get much more sympathetic. They get "character arcs," growing, learning, showing flashes of generosity and heroism. We begin to pull for them to make it. Happily, this doesn't guarantee Happily Ever After. The Ten Little Indians structure takes over as we roll towards the separation of camera from operator, encountering many inventively gnarly surprises along the way.

You have to go along with Cloverfield a bit, to suspend disbelief. Hud couldn't possibly get so coherent a story into the camera, and the military's instant response to this attack is nothing short of miraculous (perhaps they've learned lessons too). So if one requires careful exposition and painstaking verisimilitude in cinema, it's not your movie. But if you can let Hollywood tap into your id for a little Aristotelean catharsis, it may provide the best rush of goofy exhilaration in a long time.