Giant monsters had their celluloid moment in the 1950's. The grandfather of them all was Godzilla, a super-sized dinosaur whose radioactive breath expressed the all too real terrors of the atomic age, but whose slow pace as he flattened some of the most expensive real estate in Asia reminded the viewer of the blitzkrieg. After Godzilla came a lot more big lizards and sea creatures (the best of these brought to life by Ray Harryhausen's stop motion magic). And then there were a lot of giant spiders, a praying mantis, and of course Mothra, who battled Godzilla.
Cloverfield was born, so it is reported, when J. J. Adams (Lost) visited Japan, and his son picked up a Godzilla toy. 'We need our own monster,' he thought, meaning an American giant monster. But of course, America has its own monster, even older than Godzilla. King Kong was born a good twenty years before Godzilla, and the original King Kong still stands as the best Giant Monster movie.
Cloverfield cannot give us a distinctive American monster, because it so carefully hides the monster until the very end. Anyone who has seen a Godzilla movie, let alone liked it, knows exactly who and what Godzilla is. I drew countless pictures of BigG when I was a boy. No one leaving the theater after Cloverfield has more than a vague image of the monster.
Nonetheless, it is a success. The movie is presented as the record on a digital video camera found at Central Park sometime after the event. It is the Blair Witch Godzilla Project, along with all the shaky camera footage. We see a going away party (the lead is taking a job in Japan) for much of the beginning, which is all the introduction we get or need to the main characters. Then all Hell breaks loose, and we follow our heroes across Manhattan, as they try to rescue our hero's love interest. Bits and pieces of a recorded-over film help to explain why the hero is so determined to save the girl.
The video camera device has lots of flaws. Who is going to keep filming when he is being attacked by the vicious critters that fall off the back of Monster One? But it keeps the movie very tightly focused. We never learn what the monster is, or where it came from. We only know what it might be like to try to survive in a city under attack by a Gargantua. That is more than any movie has shown us before.
Cloverfield plays on two fears. One is the very real fear of terrorist attack on our cities. A lot of 9/11 mood is woven into the movie. Another is fear of the world we live on and the cosmos that surrounds it. In the scheme of things, we are really very small. Sooner or, we hope, very later, something very big will come stomping around in our pond.
My brother Dave, who is a bigger monster movie fan than I am, has identified the creature on which the monster and its parasites/offspring are modeled. It is the wind scorpion. It is the most aggressive arachnid on the planet. It has the strongest jaws in relation to size of any known creature. It is found in Iraq.
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