{"id":6507,"date":"2008-01-22T00:39:41","date_gmt":"2008-01-22T07:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dreamdawn.com\/sh\/post_view.php?index=6507"},"modified":"2008-01-22T00:39:41","modified_gmt":"2008-01-22T07:39:41","slug":"cloverfield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/?p=6507","title":{"rendered":"Cloverfield"},"content":{"rendered":"

I went to see Cloverfield<\/a> with a friend the other night. The trailer<\/a> doesn’t show you very much, and I’m not about to spoil the movie for you here, but if you are already planning on seeing this movie and would appreciate the full effect, stop reading now. Oh, wait, before you go: I was advised to sit at the way back of the theater for this one, and that advice was sound enough for me to relate it now to you with some conviction.<\/p>\n

Still with me? Ok, so from the trailer it should be pretty clear that Cloverfield is about something attacking New York City the same way Godzilla has ravaged Tokyo so many times in the last fifty years. In case you couldn’t tell, the whole film is shot as if being held by a consumer-grade handicam, Blair Witch style. The result of the constantly moving scene is at first disorienting and difficult to watch, but eventually, as with Blair Witch, I got used to it and forgot that it was even there.<\/p>\n

In return for sustaining the frenetic camera, the hand-held look lends a huge amount of credibility to the events occurring within the film. Though the actions of the main characters are somewhat unbelievable, the cinematography does an excellent job of making the events unfolding throughout the film plausible. The CG work is also excellently done; the absolutely destroyed New York City that the protagonists find themselves in cannot possibly exist, and yet as they move from block to block the visuals are stark and convincing. The camera work, combined with the convincing visuals is more than enough to make this film fun. And thankfully, when the big bad threat to the city is shown, the filmmakers don’t overdo it.<\/p>\n

What I thought was most interesting about Cloverfield is that it is so clearly a modern Giant Monster movie, and yet at the same time it is also clearly a reaction to the events of September 11th. Just as the Godzilla films reflected cultural fear about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Cloverfield’s depiction of Manhattan’s demise is quite obviously based on the terrorist attacks seven years ago. This makes Cloverfield more thoroughly a member of the Japanese Giant Monster genre than any other Western film that I know of.<\/p>\n

I’m not generally a huge fan of Giant Monster movies, but I had a lot of fun with Cloverfield and I was impressed with the film’s ability to display such a convincing environment. The filmmakers clearly know their roots, but have done a good job of innovating within the genre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I went to see Cloverfield with a friend the other night. The trailer doesn’t show you very much, and I’m not about to spoil the movie for you here, but if you are already planning on seeing this movie and would appreciate the full effect, stop reading now. Oh, wait, before you go: I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6507\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}