Monster mayhem in Manhattan

When I saw the poster for Cloverfield, I thought it was advertising an album by a nu-goth rock band of the same name, what with its iconoclastic decapitation of the Statue of Liberty against a grimy background a reflection of the world-in-turmoil angst the music no doubt conveyed. To my surprise, I bcame apprised of its true nature by a film review. And now I have seen it.
Many people have commented that this is "the 9/11 movie" by which Americans can come to terms with the events of that day. Theses will be written on this film and its social impact, but I may humbly offer my commentary here.
Another common theme emerging from the critics is that everyone is waiting for the monster. It's true. At first we are offered only tantalising glimpses of it as panic-stricken cameramen jerk their cameras all over the place as they would in reality. Because the makers do not overdo it, we always want more of the monster (its spidery underlings are a staple of many a scary movie though). This is one mean, ugly bastard and even David Attenborough or Chris Packham would be hard-pressed to find anything good to say about it. Just as Godzilla was cathartic for the Japanese after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this film does the same. But the dinosaur with the halitosis and king Kong were cuddly in a way. The centaur-like outsized gremlin (which I'm told bears a debt to South Korean flick The Host) is distinctly not likely to be flocking off the shelves in toystores.
The wanton destruction is shocking as well, not because we haven't seen it before, instead because the cameraman is not some silent omnipotent figure overseeing it all, but actually there holding the camcorder, whose video we are now watching after the event. The action is really close-up and not slick half the time either. Like in all good horror movies, the cast are a bunch of unknowns and so we don't know who's next to get bumped off, which adds to its everyman feel.
The U.S. military seems to have convened quite a sizeable force on Manhattan in just a few short hours. If this was San Francisco it would be understandable, but I guess the film-makers are hoping that we also believe in 'secret' army base near New York. Fat lot of good it does the soldiery though since the latest in conventional weaponry seems just to annoy the monster even more. Even bombs from a stealth bomber only have a kinetic impact, flattening the creature, but not harming it. So much for 'full spectrum dominance'. When the nuclear air raid sirens start pitching up towards the end of Cloverfield, it really is the end for Manhattan, perhaps even New York, as one heart begins to quail at the prospect if transplanted to reality.
There are certain glitches. There's a suspicious absence of the F-word, but then it is a fifteen certificate. On plot levels, it takes an age for the human protagonists, taking refuge at a subway station, to realise that they could walk along the tunnels to get to Midtown (where one of them wants to rescue the woman he loves). Okay, so they're in a state of shock, but surely it would click after a few minutes, if not seconds that they could do that, instead of just waiting around. Once in the tunnels, the rats start fleeing along the floor from behind them. If the rats are scared, then they may be bad , but there's something a lot worse behind them. At that point I would start running in the same direction as the rats, but the charcters just get all squeamish. Such an attitude comes back to bite them (for one of them literally).
They get out of the tunnels and get accosted by some taskforce unit. The soldiers take them to an underground field hospital. This is nothing to with September 11, 2001. The East Coast Massacres were well-noted for how few injuries there were; despite doctors and nurses bringing out all the tourneys they could and record numbers of people donating blood (which then had to be poured away since there was nowhere to store it), there was almost no-one to treat. You either died in the Towers, the Pentagon or Flight 93 or you lived (though obviously not in the latter). So maybe the parallels of that fateful day should not be drawn too closely with this film. Another dumb thing was how low the evacuee helicopters were flying. Good for the cameraman to get shots of the creature, then boom, it leaps and smacks the helicopter one. This is just to prolong the dramatic narrative; though I would have liked to seen a Goetterdammerung of the city getting nuked from afar from a helicopter's vantage point, it does have a reason, if only for covering up a script hole. And then finally, we've been treated most of the film to the monster's stomping, roaring and general huge size. Then suddenly it sneaks up on the three who are left without so much the snapping of a dry twig, taking them completely unawares. How did it do that? We are not told.
The abrupt ending brings one up short. It's a clever cinematic conceit, especially considering it's all supposed to be filmed on a camcorder with a limited running-time tape; it leaves you wanting more which I suppose is a good thing. Then the final scene is one bathetic and ironic flourish - another artistic moment where one can feel the touch of Cloverfield's makers a bit too heavily. Watching the credits roll, I know there is a party for one of them going to Japan (one reviewer seeing a nod to Godzilla in that), but there were an awful lot of songs, some barely audible against the hubbub in the foreground as the characters interact.
The monster's imperviousness to whatever is being thrown at it mirrors the sheer, inevitably massive destructive power of the evil that was unleashed on New York on that September morning. An interesting theory among a few hypothesised by the cameraman is that this beast emerged from the Mid-Atlantic ridge, a volcanic line which would explain its toughness. Odd though that it picks New York to descend upon, plenty of landmarks and skyscrapers to demolish there, unlike say, Rhode Island or out in the countryside. Possibly its not just human entrepreneurs drawn to the bright lights of the Big Apple. Disaster and action movies in the 1970s and 1980s tended to be located in California, specifically Los Angeles (e.g. Towering Inferno, Die Hard, Last Boy Scout). That was because New York was in a headlong downward spiral and it wasn't worth destroying much there because in reality it was already being destroyed. John Carpenter reinforced the point with Escape from New York (another movie where at least in the poster the Statue of Liberty is putatively decapitated), where Manhattan had been converted into a prsion island of lawlessness. The much less-successful sequel Escape from L. A. is important because it emphasises the shift that whereas New York is now respectable (and therefore worthy of humbling), Los Angeles is the metropolis tearing itself apart. The film Volcano was a brief departure from this trend, as was a 1970s movies of the dire first King Kong remake or the one of a winged monster that nested in the N. Y.'s Chrysler building. The second King Kong remake, The Day After Tomorrow (obliquely) Batman Begins and others now fling their digital-effects fury at a New York, that, aprt from 2001, had largely rehabilatated itself from tragedy.