Cloverfield is extraordinary in that it works a narrative structure
into a seemingly "natural", "handheld" experience. We get lost in the
seeming spontaneity of handheld, while consciously missing things that
are specifically being delivered to form the narrative structure of a movie.
It all looks like amateur handheld, and they sneak and embed the narrative
stuff into it. We're not supposed to notice.
A single person is supposed to be "live", raw-documenting this, but we
end up watching a movie, in the conventional manner. What makes it
brilliant is that we never end up stepping out of the movie, and thinking
this. We are just in it, and taken for a ride.
Hud is the everyman, the protagonist, because we are seeing it through
his eyes. He is just an everyday guy seeing these things. Which is
what we do when we experience every movie through the protagonist.
Cloverfield just presents us this more literally, with a video camera
and handheld footage.
What makes this particularly brilliant is that we never see Hud, thus
plunging us into first-person experience. We become the protagonist in
the truest sense.
In fact, Hud frequently takes a backseat, he becomes a character, as the camera
becomes the true protagonist.
And the movie is about two people. It is subtle, almost factual, but it
is in there. If it was /just/ a monster movie we really couldn't relate
as much. All effective action, disaster, and thriller movies have this as an anchor.
If it was just a monster movie it wouldn't have any anchor, anything to make it about people ultimately.
--
And I also wrote about this in 2008, but Cloverfield is also a metaphor,
a healing process for New York (I mean, not for New York specifically, but you know what I mean), about 9-11. To do this through metaphor
is a way to process events, to envelop, to cope - to understand, to attempt
to put in context, not through the literal, but
through the figurative. For to be able to experience this
metaphorically is a way to wrap your brain around
what happened.
Data points:
While I found Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" offensive, I found
this to be a more respectful approach to a cinematic dealing with the
tragedy of 9-11. It took a long time for the tragedy to be dealt with
in movies, and this one seemed to do it right.
