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What a monster

Deborah Ross

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

Cloverfield
15, Nationwide

OK, the main protagonists in Cloverfield are Rob (Michael Stahl-David), his brother Jason (do we care?), Jason’s girlfriend Lily (especially as they’re all unknowns) and Beth (and not very good) whom Rob slept with a month or so ago, and hasn’t spoken to since, because that is what Rob is like, the silly sausage. (Trust Rob to realise he loves her only when Manhattan is being reduced to dust and he has to go find her!) Rob and Jason and Lily and Beth are good-looking twentysomething New Yorkers who appear to have already achieved the sort of loft-living lifestyle that involves exposed brickwork, trendy art and state-of-the-art coffee machines. I do not imagine you will be on your own in thinking, from the off, that they deserve everything coming to them, and if it is especially grisly, then so be it.

What is coming to them starts coming at midnight during a going-away party for Rob, who is off to a new job in Japan (who will loft-sit?). All this is caught on a camcorder by a friend of Rob and Lily and Jason and Beth called Hud, who had been asked to film the party guests. He initially protested. ‘I’m not a professional,’ he said. You can say that again, you will say. This film, which purports to be that home video, shakes and tumbles, tumbles and shakes. When you come out of the cinema you will not only be thinking, ‘Thank God that’s over,’ having been willing it to end, but also feeling as if your eyes have been trapped in a maraca as played by a particularly wild Calypso person. It’s horrible.

Anyway, it’s midnight, and Jason is saying it how it is — ‘It’s about moments, man; forget the world, you’ve got to hang on to the people you love most’ — when the building shakes with an earthquake-like intensity, loud animal noises reverberate outside, the city loses power and the head of the Statue of Liberty crashes to the street in front of the apartment building. I’m guessing you know you are not just in trouble, but in deep trouble, when the head of the Statue of Liberty rolls down your street. Is this meant, by the way, to be symbolic of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness being decapitated? I’d say yes, but only because it’s so blindingly and insultingly obvious.