I got to sit and watch the last 20 minutes of Cloverfield just now.  When I originally joined a packed house to see it on opening night, some combination of the hot dogs (with jalapenos) that I had just eaten and the choice to sit near the front of the theater precluded me from, well, making it through the whole film.  It’s a handicam film, and that means that the video frame moves around quite a bit.

I was hesitant to review the film before I had seen the whole thing.  I have a long-standing belief that the quality of a movie is a constant – that if you’re offended by the first third of a movie, you aren’t likely to find the last 2/3 very appealing, either.  In films where there is lots of action, it is quite typically spread out throughout the film.  So with Cloverfield, I had originally seen enough of the film to pass personal judgment.  But writing a review and talking about a movie publicly requires more care.  There are exceptions to the consistency rule.  I’m sure that I will see a film some day where I am bored-to-tears for 98% of the duration and then ripped to the edge of my seat at the very end.

Thinking of The Sixth Sense, perhaps?  I ruined that film’s twist by leaning over to my wife about 15 minutes along and speculating “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” and my speculation was the exact twist ending.

But Cloverfield, if anything, is a movie that builds excitement as it goes.  The initial premise is this – the audience are all being allowed to see footage recovered from a spectacular event.  The footage was taken by persons who were on the scene.  The scene is New York City.  The footage is entirely contained on one tape.  It is not congruous.

And therein lies the clever bit in Cloverfield.  It’s hard to explain, but I’ll try:

Imagine that you and I had a video camera and we recorded various parts of a day we spent together.  Let’s say that we got 80 minutes of footage all together, spread out over most of the day.  Now imagine that the tape is rewound in the camera, and then we watch a few minutes, and then the camera is accidentally handed over to someone else, who sets out to document other events.  Well – there goes our previous recording.  Except that this third person stops every now and then and fast-forwards the tape a few seconds before he continues his filming.  Now what have you got?

If we did this in real-life, without any planning, you’d have a mess.  But if it was scripted just so… it might be the most magical voyeurism around.

Cloverfield was written by Drew Goddard, who also wrote several episodes of both J.J. Abrahms’ television shows (Alias, Lost) and Joss Whedon’s (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel).  Goddard has no small task.  Unlike most scripts, he does not get to write straight, trade-off dialogue here.  Instead, the dialogue takes a back seat to the purpose of each line delivered.  Handicam or no, excellent sound effects or no, the realism of Cloverfield depends almost entirely on the script telling the actors what to do.  What they say is almost lost in the din of haste to run for our lives that constitutes the movie, once it gets going.

And let’s not overlook the sounds of Cloverfield.  Of course, we are amazed by how seamlessly New York City can be destroyed all around actors nowadays (witness I Am Legend), but the grandeur that is modern CG-visual green-screen super-double-throwdown fakery would be undermined in one second if not for sound effects being proper, and Cloverfield deserves an Oscar for sound.  I hope that it is remembered a year from now.  Note that the entire narrative is captured by a single handicam, so the only music in the movie is that which the handicam’s microphone encounters during one scene.  Music often takes some of the load from the shoulders of sound engineers – mistakes can go unnoticed by the listener, whose ear is busy with an orchestral score.  Not so in Cloverfield.  In many scenes, the lack of score heightens the terror much more than screeching violins could have.

The in-front-of-camera acting is mostly handled by Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas and Michael Stahl-David, who plays the leader-of-the-pack, Rob.  This is really Stahl-David’s first major movie role, to which he graduated from a leading role in the short-lived television drama The Black Donnellys.  He does an excellent job of keeping the continuity of the character, which cannot be easy when filming takes place over days and weeks.

J.J. Abrahms, of course, is the defining personality of Cloverfield, and it resembles his most major work – television’s Lost – in several ways, the primary of which is a willingness to leave all which is unseen by the camera unknown.  This is not an absolute.  In one scene that drew gasps from the audience, the camera is taken into a television shop and pointed at a newscast.  This essentially gave the movie a second camera for a moment, and was a trick that was not overused.  Abrahms and Goddard are happy to leave the audience wanting more, and in some cases – such as a clear understanding of exactly what it is making all that noise – much more.  In our screening of the movie, many in the audience were demonstrably upset when the credits began to roll.  Their complaint was that too many questions had been asked and not answered.

I believe that, if this is an issue, then it is a risk that you take when you go to the movies.  I knew one person (perhaps the only one in the world) who knew nothing about The Fellowship Of The Ring when she went to see the film.  Afterwards, she was quite frustrated that “it didn’t have an ending.”  This has never been an issue for me, even when I was expecting a different ending to a film than was delivered.  In particular, with what some call “hyper-realistic” movies such as Cloverfield, the less unlikely the ending, the better.  In overly-contrived drama, we often get (and have come to expect) a huge spider web of events to lead to an unforeseen conclusion, or a conclusion through which we get a very high amount of closure.  In reality, there is little closure, and Cloverfield‘s ending is exactly the sort of punctuation mark that reality would have, were it being viewed on the big-screen.

I give Cloverfield an A-, or an 8 out of 10.  My hope is that its success doesn’t spawn a rash of single-hand-camera gimmick movies, because that is a very difficult method to pull off, and it could never be used as a crutch.  If for no other reason, think of the jalapeno hot dog eating public!