Entertainment, Movies - Marine Corps Times

Film review: ‘Cloverfield,’ 2 ½ stars

The much-hyped monster movie from “Alias” impresario J.J. Abrams, “Cloverfield,” is 20 minutes of head-scratching tedium followed by a 60-minute, one-note gimmick.

But as gimmicks go, it’s not bad, especially if you’re a B-movie fan — a group of panicked twentysomethings try to survive the destruction of Manhattan by a 20-story-high creature.

And the whole thing is seen through the lens of a single video camera (a la “The Blair Witch Project”) that one young dude insists, against all logic, on lugging around the city as it collapses around them. (“People are gonna want to know how it all went down, man!”)

“Cloverfield” opens with Rob (Michael Stahl-David) videotaping a cute girl named Beth (Odette Yustman) in his bed on the morning after a tryst in his absent father’s spacious Midtown apartment.

When the camera is next turned on, it’s a month later, and we’re at a going-away party for Rob, who’s about to depart for some kind of corporate job in Japan.

Rob’s friend Hud (T.J. Miller) is tasked with videotaping the testimonials of all the guests as a going-away present.

If this scene had lasted five minutes, no one would have thought twice about it. But it runs on for almost 20 minutes (no lie) with a stream of vapid, boring comments from random people interspersed with fuzzy panning shots of floor, walls and ceiling.

Just when the scene reaches the edge of turning into a stupid, annoying joke, the entire apartment building shudders, as if from an earthquake, and the partygoers rush outside to try to find out what’s going on.

Boom! Miss Liberty’s head comes rolling down the avenue like a bowling ball. Sproing! There go the cables holding up the Brooklyn Bridge. Blam! The Empire State Building crumbles (eerily evoking the World Trade Center’s fall on Sept. 11).

From this point, director Matt Reeves and writer Drew Goddard, both veterans of TV drama (Goddard worked with Abrams for a time on “Alias”), have one goal and one goal only: amp up the special effects.

Beyond that, this is the ultimate exercise in minimalist filmmaking — the characters matter not a whit; there is no “story,” per se; and no attempt is made to give any explanation of the origins of the monster (which is barely glimpsed for most of the film, but emerges more fully in the late going).

It’s just an hourlong thrill ride through a long and scary night, with random shocks (one long scene in a pitch-black subway tunnel had me cringing) leavened by a few bursts of nervous humor.

“Do you know what that thing is out there?” a hysterical Rob asks one of the outmatched Army troops deployed to battle the menace. “Whatever it is, it’s winning!” comes the terse reply.

I overheard several people at my screening puzzling over the film’s title, since there is no “Cloverfield” in New York City.

For the record, this apparently was just an early code name for the project — Cloverfield Boulevard is the Santa Monica, Calif., locale where Abrams’ Bad Robot production company had its offices during filming.

Keeping that as the finished film’s name is pretentious and lazy. Then again, the stripped-down, bare-bones nature of the endeavor probably precludes any alternatives more meaningful than “Monster Movie.”

The booming action scenes are really all there is to be had here, so viewers will have to decide for themselves if that’s sufficient incentive. “Cloverfield” is an interesting but highly flawed experiment — one that I think people will love and hate in roughly equal numbers.

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Rated PG-13 for violence, language.