Cloverfield

Saw Cloverfield the other day. I might not have bothered to go by myself, but when one of my sons suggested a visit to the local multiplex - well, how could I resist?

Of course it's arrived at cinemas following an avalanche of publicity, the result of JJ Abrams' (of Lost fame) extremely astute marketing campaign, which began with brief, suggestive trailers and the laying of trails over the internet, which ensured that, by the time it was actually released, legions of film fans were breathless with excitement.

Did it live up to the hype? Well, it wasn't aimed at people like me, and I took only a marginal interest in it all, but I was lured into going to see it by some favourable reviews. I had initially suspected it might turn out to be a bit of a Blair Witch Project, i.e. completely underwhelming, but it sounded highly promising. I remember seeing Blair Witch in a packed cinema. A Spanish girl behind me needed every piece of dialogue (such as it was) translated for her. The audience chattered throughout, and ath the end, as everyone got up to go, someone stood up and shouted, 'Well that was a pile of ****!', and I had to agree. Well, Cloverfield was vastly better than that.
I was attracted by it's length, or lack of it - 87 minutes; I agree with Mark Kermode (Radio 5Live's film critic), that far too many films nowadays are excessively and unnecessarily long, and shorter films need to be actively welcomed.

It's a pretty mechanical experience, especially after my recent heavy dose of Herzog's films. It's none the worse for that, though, and far better than some of the bloated blockbusters we've been treated to in recent years. The film's premise is that the wobbly, hand-held footage has been recovered from New York, which has just been devastated by a rampaging monster attack.
The first 15 minutes sets the scene. We're at a party, in a New York apartment, populated by the most irritating set of characters seen in a movie in living memory, so we don't get to care about any of them, which is just as well. One of the partygoers is videoing everything, rather badly, and it's his point of view from which the action takes place. The party is suddenly interrupted by a crash, and something has ripped the head off the Statue of Liberty, which has landed in the street outside, and from now on, it's chaos, as everything collapses.
And that's it, basically. it's definitely a post 9/11 movie, and I can't imagine it would have been made in the same way without all that amateur video footage of the disaster. So it's a fascinating document of the film industry in 2008, and none the worse for that.