First of all, let me just say I get it.

I get that Clover­field is meant to be a mod­ern day ana­logue of Godzilla. I get that post­war Japan­ese movie­go­ers wit­nessed an enraged giant lizard borne of nuclear tech­nol­ogy stomp Tokyo flat in an unstop­pable piqué, and I get that the (actu­ally pretty crappy) Godzilla became a clas­sic for that rea­son. I get that we West­ern­ers were long due to be attacked on film by own very own alle­gor­i­cal crea­ture as pop ther­apy for our ter­ror­ism anxieties.

Per­haps we need that movie some time. But while less crappy than Godzilla in terms of visual style and spe­cial effects, I don’t think Clover­field is that movie.

As a long­time fan of J.J. Abrams from Alias and Lost, and made a help­less sucker by the film’s clever mar­ket­ing, I very much wanted to love Clover­field. How­ever, I found it extremely dif­fi­cult to watch and to like, for two basic rea­sons both related to my being a New Yorker for a decade & change: I. unlike­able and unre­al­is­tic char­ac­ters, and II. what can only be described as 9/11-ploitation.

I. THE CHARACTERS

We know the back­grounds of only two char­ac­ters, Rob and Beth. Rob has recently been pro­moted to Vice Pres­i­dent of an unspec­i­fied type of com­pany at an improb­a­bly young age, and is about to leave for a long busi­ness trip to Japan. In my under­stand­ing of lifestyles of the rich & beau­ti­ful in New York City, such young execs were more com­monly found in the dot-com 90s econ­omy, but even now still do exist in scrappy new media com­pa­nies like CollegeHumor.com. But let’s assume Rob helped invent the next Face­book and move on.

Yowza howza! I go to par­ties like this all the time.

We don’t know what Beth, his one true love, does for a liv­ing, if any­thing. She lives with her fam­ily high up the north­ern tower of the Time Warner Cen­ter (more on that later). Her stun­ning looks and wardrobe might peg her as model, but she appears to be a socialite born of priv­i­lege. But far from the slow train­wrecks that are Paris and Nicky, Beth appears to be a sweet, sober girl. In fact, she leaves a party not uncon­scious in the back of a limo, but out of pro­pri­ety, to go home to bed, alone.

Us reg­u­lar joes are sup­posed to iden­tify with and care about these peo­ple? For all its faults, Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (another monster-attack film touch­ing uncom­fort­ably upon dis­as­ter in a post 9/11 world) fea­tured a “reg­u­lar joe” type char­ac­ter in auto repair­man Tom Cruise. To be fair, Godzilla was full of white-coated sci­en­tists and teeth-gritted soldier-types, so the genre doesn’t exactly call for com­par­a­tively bor­ing lower wage-earners that don’t live in lux­ury con­dos and party in down­town lofts.

II. 9/11-SPLOITATION

Godzilla is utterly frank in link­ing the mon­ster with the hor­rors of the nuclear age. So if Clover­field’s beast is a per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of ter­ror­ism, how does the metaphor fit? Did US mil­i­tary adven­tur­ism in Afghanistan and Iraq unearth the mon­ster? Is the beast a hereto­fore undis­cov­ered sub­ter­ranean oil-feeder, angered by our drain­ing the earth’s sup­ply of fos­sil fuel? With­out a clear metaphor, Clover­field just seems to enjoy allud­ing to the super­fi­cial events and imagery of 9/11 with­out any depth: sky­scrap­ers “pan­cak­ing” them­selves flat, streets fill­ing with clouds of debris, ash-coated sur­vivors struck numb. I’m not against pop­u­lar fic­tion using metaphor to touch upon raw nerves that maybe need to be tweaked now and then… but is Clover­field it?

It’s only a movie.

One of the film’s key set pieces is set atop the twin tow­ers of the Time Warner Cen­ter. The allu­sion is clear, but it’s a stretch fac­tu­ally. Are there res­i­den­tial apart­ments in the TW Cen­ter? As both a New Yorker and Time Warner employee, this is news to me. I should also add that the geog­ra­phy of Man­hat­tan as seen in the film is just this side of real­is­tic. In a space of about 6 hours, it’s plau­si­ble the char­ac­ters could make it from lower Man­hat­tan to the roof of the Time Warner Cen­ter at the south­ern foot of Cen­tral Park (assum­ing, that is, that their young thighs are capa­ble of the trek).

Inva­sion of the Bodys­natch­ers is one exam­ple of a sci-fi thriller that has worked well enough to illu­mi­nate con­cerns of the times to war­rant mul­ti­ple remakes. Just to name three: the orig­i­nal took on McCarthy­ism, the Abel Fer­rara 90’s ver­sion looked at obe­di­ence and con­for­mity in the mil­i­tary, and Robert Rodriguez’s The Fac­ulty found the story use­ful as a satir­i­cal cri­tique of high school peer pres­sure. But Bodys­natch­ers didn’t present us with recre­ations of cities pressed flat; were con­tem­po­rary Japan­ese made sick by the sight of their hor­rors anthro­po­mor­phized in a giant lizard? See­ing my home city’s sky­line smok­ing and col­laps­ing was not some­thing I would call cathartic.

I saw the film early evening on open­ing day, with an audi­ence full of kids just out of school. The movie went over like a lead bal­loon; the con­clu­sion was loudly heck­led and booed. I sus­pect the kids mostly objected to the uncon­ven­tional struc­ture and end­ing. Which is, for what it’s worth, what I found best about the film: it pro­vides a very mov­ingly unex­pected happy ending.

Offi­cial movie site: www.cloverfieldmovie.com

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