The premise was great; Godzilla movie shot entirely from the point of view of Joe Everyman. Best BUy handycam style and all. No hero military dude flying an airplane into the monster. No scientist who has an idea thats just so crazy it might just work. No Will Smith winking at the camera quips. Just you the viewer experiencing pure pandamonium. It's to my knowledge never been done before. Excellent, a revolution in this specific form of genre fiction. Color me excited that the dude [JJ Abrams] who revitalized serialized thriller/sci-fi on television [with LOST] is bringing us this. However, come 1.18.08 a revolutionary piece of genre fiction was not delivered. Instead we got the Harold "Baby Jordan" Miner1 of supposedly intellectual blockbuster films.
The problem with this movie is twofold, the first most glaring problem is the unremarkable characters. We spend 20 minutes with these characters before the monster shows up, and while those 20 minutes would play well as the first 20 minutes of an experimental rom com of some sort, they do nothing to establish any sort of bond between characters who will be put in life or death circumstances in minutes. We're told Rob is best friends with Hud. Rob is leaving to become vice president of some company in japan and is already apparently wildy financially successful. Hud at times seems functionally retarded. We've been told, that these two are best friends, "main dudes" as it were, but we're never shown that theyre friends or why. I'd imagine they're on some Of Mice And Men jumpoff but thats purely conjecture. We're told that the chick Rob irrationally risks his life for [along with the lives of his friends] is amazing, but were never shown it. In fact she seems kind of like a dick, bringing another dude to homeboys going away party.
The unsympathetic characters directly lead to the second problem, which is an issue of tone. If Abrams and company made the directorial decision to shoot this all "first person", one imagines it's to get us to connect with the characters more and give us a sense of realism [see the opening text of the film for support of this argument]. Yet in direct opposition to realism, we have characters making strictly Independence Day level decisions.
"Oh theres a 30 story monster attacking midtown Manhattan? this girl i once spent a lustful weekend with, that i then dissed is in midtown Manhattan. well shit yeah im going to midtown Manhattan!"
"my main dude is clearly out of his mind and caught the vapors. hes gonna go and try to scale a building thats fallen into another building to go save some myspace crush of his. im gonna go too. and bring my camera. say word."
I understand that as a filmmaker you have certain set pieces in mind and in a movie like this you simply need a plot that facilitates connecting those dots, but if you must do so please give me more plausible reactions and responses from your main characters. Make this chick his wife and ill believe he'll go into the fire for her [sorta], make it his sister and i might maybe believe it. but please dont make it some chick he banged once. because itll really take me out of the movie.
in retrospect sticking with one set of characters was probably the fatal flaw. You don't have a ton of time to setup a back story for your characters, and for the most part they'll be running around screaming and crying and looking confused. you're setting yourself up for failure. so why not ditch the idea of a hero all together. you want to play up the found footage and realism aspect? make Cloverfield an anthology of vignettes from around the city as the monster attacks. with some careful direction and careful dosages you can take these same characters sketches and make me care about them. the set piece of the party being broken up to the monster attack was great, it felt immediate it felt real. it brought back memories of all those shared consciousness events (JFK assasination, Challenger explosion, Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11 et al.) it played through great to the Statue Of Liberty Head landing on the street and people taking pictures of it. the confusion and lack of information all rang true. perfect time to say goodbye.
show me a new group of people confronting this event in a new set piece. if you start the subway sequence off with people being trapped in a subway car and finally deciding to make a break for it, i dont scoff "why are you walking through the subway!!!??, don't you know theres monsters in there?" and loose all sense of realism. instead i say "damn...i wouldn't want to be them". you need to relay important expositional plot points? dont give me "army dude, the plot device", who has no point other than giving me plot points. instead show me people watching the events live from way up town or in any of the outer boroughs. close enough to be in danger but not immediately.
really we end up with an interesting mvoie, worth the $10 in spectacle alone, but it could've been a great movie. it should have been a champion and not just a dude who won the dunk competition twice.
1 for those of you not up on your mid nineties NBA game, Harold Miner was a promising guard coming out of college who had the dubious distinction of being labeled "Baby Jordan" for his dunking ability. but as chance would have it other than winning the slam dunk contest twice, [once against future Jeopardy answer J.R Rider] dude's career was as about as memorable as a Jeff Hanneman solo.
