Mini-Review

I know I'm a couple of years late on this, but over the last few days I've been watching the film Cloverfield. I'm finding it very fascinating. Horror movies usually have a proxy villain that  reveal the things that we're truly afraid of. For instance, the early Godzilla films were Japanese made and were really all about the nuclear destruction at Hiroshimi and Nagasaki. Godzilla was a creature created by nuclear radiation, and he was able to breathe out a nuclear blast from his mouth. The film gave its Japanese creators a chance to play out their fears for everyone to see. It was sort of therapeutic, I would think.

The same could be said about this film. It's pretty obvious watching Cloverfield that it was filmed after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The real monster in the film is not the Godzilla-like creature that is attacking everyone. Rather, it's the memory of 9/11 and the confines of the city that make the film frightening. The film, in fact, finishes the terrorists' work, adding the fictional destruction of the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building to the real destruction of the World Trade Centers, and these fictional destructions render the city similarly covered in ash and debris. It is a horror film for the age.

That said, the film gave me a headache with all of its simulated home movie panning and zooming. I'd still recommend it, though. It was fun, if for no other reason than as an examination of what I mentioned above.