We were lucky enough to score tickets to the preview of this month's long-awaited winter blockbuster: Cloverfield. Brought to us by J.J. Abrams, the story centers around a giant wingless, de-horned pterodactyl wreaking havoc in a fictionalized New York city - a city in which giant, wingless, de-horned pterodactyls wreak havoc and New Yorkers run about screaming and dying.
Although the cinematic delights offered by a premise in which New York is destroyed by aliens or natural disasters is something of which we, as audiences, never seem to tire, Cloverfield sorely lets us down in several departments.
Cinematography is, unfortunately, terrible in this film. Most of it seems to have been shot on hand held video camera or something - the perspective wobbles and shakes around, robbing audiences of the true horrors they experienced in their livingrooms on 9/11. On that day, tourists and camera crews at least had the presence of mind to hold the cameras still. If you enjoyed 9/11 as much as MSNBC, Fox News, CNN and Rupert Murdoch did, then this film is still going to be a treat.
For most of us - the 96% of humans who aren't sociopaths - you should be able to suspend your disbelief. And if you've been watching a lot of cable news channels over the past couple of years, you should be numb enough to accept any implausibility as fact. Evolution is just a theory, people, and the French are behind everything.
Meanwhile, the film's editing is a little random and haphazard; indeed, most of Cloverfield is stitched together by an epileptic with a bad case of the shakes. What's with the continuity? There are more missing bits than a videotape of a Cheney family quail hunt.
And the dialogue! Talk about lackluster! Notable lines include: "Oh my God! Oh my God!" and "Run! Run!" In short, much of the dialog reminds one the last half hour of Twister, a film we reviewed in the 1990s on the mistaken belief that it was a film adaption of the famous board game.
Boy was I sorry.
Anyway, when the Statue of Liberty is decapitated in Cloverfield, I am sure savvy Republicans will be asking themselves: what, is J.J. Abrams some kind of naive Liberal who hates it when liberty is decapitated? Or something. And many of us will be asking ourselves what it is, after all, that is so monstrous about losing liberty for the sake of security? In this case, security approximates to the experience of running around in fear of your life while soldiers race desperately through the streets in a gigantic, futile effort to kill something much bigger than them, something that can't be killed. New Yorkers in fear of their lives - there is something so curiously familiar about that. Perhaps it's one of those an analogy-thingies they talked about in the 'How to be a bad film critic' class at the local night school.
But, seeing how nobody seems to have said it yet, and seeing how hundreds of critics will, we might as well get it out of the way: Cloverield? Iraq. Katrina. Cloverfield? Iraq. Of course, film critics said the same thing with 300, which wasn't about Iraq and it's a crying shame that people have to turn to us for accuracy in reporting. (See Why Film Critics Don't Understand 300 [1] for example.)
Also, we think it's entirely unrealistic for a giant wingless, de-horned pterodactyl to be walking around New York anyway. We know who the enemy is and it seems absurd to get us afraid of giant monsters when billions have already been spent on making us afraid of other things.
In final analysis - J.J.Abrams should hire some camera crew who know how to hold a camera still. You'll find analogy in this film if you're looking for it. But most of us will support demands for more money from Congress to fund measures by which America may be protected from giant wingless de-horned pterodactyls.
We give this flick 10/10.