A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: Cloverfield

Date Viewed: 1/20/08

Details:

Lizzy Caplan

Jessica Lucas

T.J. Miller

Michael Stahl-David

Mike Vogel

Odette Yustman

Director: Matt Reeves

Score: -1/2

The Review: War of the Worlds meets Alien, with cinematography by The Blair Witch Project. Tired concept; nauseous implementation.

The human eye -- indeed the entire primate visual system -- is remarkable. The eyeball is constantly in motion, there are periods of rapid scanning (saccades) when the visual input seems suppressed, dynamic range is stressed by brilliant sunlight and darkest shadows -- all this is coupled to a mobile cranium, eyeballs whose corneas need to be lubricated with sporadic blinks, and other messy consequences of biological systems. You're left with a visual field that, in its raw form, must be incredibly fractured, way beyond dynamic, discontinuous, multi-focal, nearly dizzying. Luckily for us, this sensorium is heavily processed, filtered, fused, spliced and occasionally filled in by computational fantasy by the routine actions of the normal visual cortex -- and what we "see" is steady, contextual, and continuous. I say luckily, because if this were not the case, than our everyday life would be as if viewed through the lens of Cloverfield.

This story -- of something big, and destructive, happening in Manhattan -- is told through the eye of a video camera that was originally intended to document a going-away party for one of the lead characters (Stahl-David). And a very bumpy ride it is. The eye is not under the control of a professional videographer, especially as it tracks much too close with zoom, and moves much too fast in pan -- classic examples of amateur mistakes captured into a glimpse of "reality" cinema. But then, this is not a pretentious film -- and that's good! (This is where it differs positively from The Blair Witch Project.) Its only presumption is to take away not quite two hours of your life. The actors are essentially no-names, the SFX sporadic and mostly in the background for most of the film. The effects and the cause of the damage have been kept moderately well as secret by the trailers -- one of the more successful recent attempts at building interest without giving away the entire plot.

This science fiction tale is mostly fiction, with very little science -- more an adventure thriller with limited geography. But again, it's not attempting to be anything else, and I'll give it that much credit -- not a lot, but some.

(20-Jan-08)

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