Cloverfield 3 - The Reckoning

Fear Constructed - > Served - > Consumed

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City, Monster, Terror, Popcorn. Fear Constructed - > Served - > Consumed. Sure, I admit I was going for a media hack attempt when chose the title of this Cloverfield review. After all, it might be interesting to read about the third Cloverfield installment when there is just one episode out and a second one hangs in preproduction state. It seems we have to wait for a while indeed, as the very next scheduled monster of the series is due to arrive in 2009 via J.J. Abrahm's enigmatically titled Untitled J. J. Abrahm's Cloverfield Sequel.

SERIES? Now what could give me THAT particular idea? No one ever said that Cloverfield will be a series - so today seems proper of a time to form and voice this curious suspicion. I think it WILL be a series, even better/worse: will be a highly successful one. From a profit point of view, nevertheless. As far as the cultural impact carried and delivered by Cloverfield goes though, I am pretty sure it already told all about itself that was worth telling via the narrative decisions it currently and steadily (SIC!) relies on.

I truly don't like accounting films via naming their inspirators, yet now those are so important and evident that I decided to form an exception to solidify a rule. Mix The Blair Witch Project and the Godzilla myths, add a bunch of everyday average normal guys armed with some everyday average normal camera, then sit back and behold Cloverfield revealing itself as highly calculable of an output as a person with prior knowledge about the inspirators would anticipate it to end up as. I found this installment not a tad better or a tad worse than I expected it to be - though there were no surprises for the onion, let us soak into the mathematically constructed excitement via Godzilla's now-absolutely humorless canvas debut.



OMIGOOOOD! OMIGOOOOD!

Cloverfield is a quite cunning, legit recipe actually as far as commercial coherence goes, yet even this promising consortium of the Godzilla genre with fakeumentary appeals - hick! - is compromised massively by the sickness all similar movies have exhibited to this day. If you have a fictional monster to tear a city apart and a camera just to backup epic memories, then fun is imminent - yet I have a mild suspicion that the creators of Cloverfield had absolutely no clue about how to fill in 69 minutes with the Monster Mayhem and keep you interested all the while.

A harsh statement? Of course. Now let's inspect why these fakeumentary installments - except for the Prime Fakeumentray Originator The Blair Witch Project - suck like: baaaad.

The focal element a handycam narrative usually relies on is: instability. Instability and constant panic, as the constant panic is the primal element to summon and solidify instability - < - notice the nice noise here - itself, no? Notice also how these panic-based fakeumentaries tend to massively rely on modal chaos and uncertainty to claim - I would say: crave, rather - meritorious appeals. Almost nothing beyond panic was presented in narrative fakeumentaries, yet makers of Cloverfield probably thought that panic was shown already, indeed - but not quite enough of it, and not for long enough, either.

The effort possesses quite a limited tool set in my opinion, in which you can find narrative components to rely either on:

1. Panic

2. Terror

3. Both

Surely all this sounds as a narrative buildup with potential, but trust me: once panic is endless, then panic is pointless. Confirmation: what reason do I have to maintain my panic when I am steadily having it since HOURS? A panic you have since hours is not a panic, and a panic shown for loooong long doses of 10-minute blocks just to be occasionally interrupted by blatantly bland word trades gets surprisingly boring. This is why it seems so easy to catch panic-related fakeumentary efforts red handed, Cloverfield is a precious archetype for this symptom. Panic, Panic, Panic. Omigod, Omigod, Omigod.

The attraction itself tries to convince you of it's own blatant power via this here concept I shall elaborate on cheerfully: the handycam tells you that you are PRESENT, INVOLVED and AFFECTED - yet intensity usually teams up with a not quite appealing clumsiness factor, a phenomena which you might even consider as an intentional, a necessary design decision. In some other reality though, these clumsinesses are the negative aspects of fakeumentaries: constant panic shown in a constantly instable manner quickly boils down to deliver a generally average excitement level at best, then, from that point on: you slowly yet surely will start to lose interest, trust me. The most significant problem with Cloverfield is that it does not add anything at all to itself when not involving you in the chaos and rampant fear it focally attempts to reveal and capture. Let me tell you this: I am more afraid of the protagonists than of the monsters.

By the casual peace periods you see these bunch of everyday average normal guys taking their oh! so trivial breaths, mind you, now these are highly traumatized everyday average normal guys. Their words represent as much significance or legit narrative input as - sorry 'bout that - a fart in the elevator. Narrative sections The Blair Witch Project fills in by quality fear and exquisite tension gets shamefully wasted or not even touched upon by Cloverfield. This is a Bah!, even a BAH!



OMIGOOOOD! OMIGOOOOD!

Remember the horrible Spanish fakeumentray [REC], a gruesome, blaming index finger to molest the mighty nose of the zombie genre - in my opinion, you simply fail to maintain stable interest towards those shouting people. In this here movie Cloverfield - the general output seems and feels very similar. For the majority of the program time you see frightened masses of people having no idea what is going on, also, your view is necessarily constrained to THEIR point of view. All this consorts with a nice tone of narrative rawness in the earlier sections, yet the creators probably considered the method so powerful on it's own merits that they make no noticeable effort to offer even a vague versatility of some kind which would reign beyond panic.

Narrative constraints are becoming slight or more profound hindrances while these constraints were supposed to be the focal attractions here. Surely, these aspects do not necessarily form a problem group - especially not if you have more stuff to show than constant panic. Make no mistake though: Cloverfield shows nothing but constant panic. There is a quite sorrowful aspect of this depicted phenomena, unfortunately. It becomes very hard, and frankly, extremely tiresome to relate to after a while. And "after a while" usually equals half an hour flat, at best.

Flashy, blurry images for half a minute that you can't make a crap out of, then:

They go like: "OMIGOD!"

You go like: "OMIGOD!"

Flashy, blurry images for 2 minutes that you can't make a crap out of, then:

They go like: "OMIGOD!"

You go like: "Yeah! OMIGOD!"

Flashy, blurry images for 5 minutes that you can't make a crap out of, then:

They go like: "Vhoooooonnnooo! OMIGOD!"

You go like: "Yeah."

Flashy, blurry images for 2 minutes that you can't make a crap out of, then:

They go like: "Aaaaaaah! Vhaaaaaa! OMIGOD!"

You go like: "...zZzZz...zZzZz....zZzZz..."

Cloverfield indeed relies on massively blurred and uncertain images to present the peek moments, the intersecting sequences are governed by the quite tiresome acting delivery of the little party you forced to be a participant of. The movie starts out with a similarly tiresome, somewhat supertasteless and colorless birthday party, a scene you are to watch for 20 minutes of All Eternity, prior to the monster's

Highly Welcomed Arrival

All this should converge our attention to the mere fact that even the creators of the movie considered their ideas to sell out totally and completely in 50 minutes flat. You will get 'nuff of handycam terror and monster(s!) from that 50 minutes, have no doubt about that. Cloverfield has some nice scares and scenes in it, a couple of moments to stand out from the fluctuant, chaotic fabric to massively characterize the final output. As of today, we surely should not anticipate anything different or anything more from the upcoming Cloverfield installments than monsters to traumatize a whole city, yet fortunately the first episode delivers so much of these attraction that developments are immensely needed and hopefully will be delivered via the follow-up(s).

In the meantime, point a camera to a Foul Sky and sing a One Note Song of Fear.



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