Gladiator - Are You Not Entertained?!

It's ironic — in an Alanis Morissette kinda way — that a new breed of action hero should have been born of a film that harks back so resolutely to a past era. Not the era of ancient Rome as such, but of the Hollywood period epic which presided over the blockbuster pantheon from the days of silent cinema to the 1970s, when it was usurped by the more contemporary spectacles of blazing skyscrapers and overturned ocean liners.

Grand scale sci-fi and the FX revolution of the late 70s/early 80s effectively delivered the deathblow to the sword'n'sandal monolith. We can be grateful then that it was Scott, a director renowned for his majestic cinematic vision, who chose to breathe new life into the old war-horse. And what life it is.

After an initial period of uncertainty, Scott leapt aboard when he was shown a Victorian painting of two gladiators locked in mortal combat, the sunlight streaming into the arena and the vast crowd baying for blood. It's not hard to see what appealed to him: the intensity of the moment, the sweeping spectacle and the image itself, a portrait of a fantastically advanced society resplendent in cultural riches yet underpinned by obscene cruelty and recreational violence.

The opening battle scene, visceral, mud-spattered and drenched in blood, sets the tone. Hordes of extras crashing against each other in waves; agonising hand-to-hand combat; a deluge of flaming arrows and exploding fireballs turning the forest into a hellish conflagration; the noise and stench and chaos of the melee. And Scott puts us right in the thick of it. Brilliant use of Steadicam and stroboscopic editing give you a taste of military conflict from a time when to kill a man in battle meant standing close enough to feel his breath on your face.

The sequence is one of many stunning set pieces that punctuate the story of Maximus Decimus Meridius (Crowe), the star general of the Roman army who is betrayed by the Emperor Commodus, sold into slavery and forced to become a gladiator. Plotting revenge for the murder of his wife and child, he becomes a hero of the people, ultimately confronting his nemesis on the killing floor of the Colosseum. Originally the part of Maximus was earmarked for Antonio Banderas (that's why, presumably, he's Spanish). Banderas makes a lot of sense — he has the looks, the physicality and screen presence. But luckily, he bailed, leaving the way open for Crowe. Crowe has all the qualifications that Banderas has, but where Banderas' prowess as an action star is essentially cinematic (he looks good firing a handgun in slo-mo, basically), Crowe gives the impression that he genuinely is quite a bit harder than the average nail.

He is worlds away from the ludicrous, neo-narcissist musclemen of the 80s (Arnie, Sly et al) and doesn't fit comfortably into the mid 90s school of lithe pretty boys (Keanu, Nic Cage etc.) either. Instead, like the film itself, he's a throwback to the action stars of yesteryear. Kirk Douglas is, for several reasons, the obvious example: unconventionally handsome, athletic without being showy and, most importantly, as solid as a rock. (Douglas also played a gladiator in some film or other.) Crowe is not a big man, he certainly doesn't have a bodybuilder's physique, but in the fight scenes his victories are totally convincing, even when he's pitted against seemingly insuperable odds. The look in his eyes, wracked with pain, boiling with testosterone and burning with hate has a singular message: don't fucking mess.

The fights themselves are thrillingly orchestrated and again feature fractured, kinetic editing and dynamic camerawork. They are so exciting, in fact, particularly the one where Maximus fights the retired champion while snarling tigers hem them into the centre of the arena, you get the slightly uncomfortable feeling that the emotions they stir are not so very far removed from those experienced by the roaring crowd. Scott's Rome — part ancient metropolis, part modern Manhattan, part Speer's Nazi Berlin — are suitably awe-inspiring; Joaquin Phoenix enjoys himself immensely as the loopy Commodus and there's a host of fruity English thesps filling up the type of roles that were once the preserve of Jack Hawkins, Peter Ustinov and Larry Olivier.

David Hemmings is tremendous as the ringmaster Cassius, Richard Harris cuts the ham thick as Emperor Marcus Aurelius and Derek Jacobi (no stranger to a toga) is typically solid as a liberal senator. But of the character players it is, of course, Oliver Reed who leaves the most indelible impression. Reed died during the production, but his gruff, bravura performance as gladiator trainer Proximo is a fitting swansong and his final line of dialogue — "We mortals are but shadows and dust" — a hauntingly apt epitaph. That said, "You sold me queer giraffes!" is an even better one

Grade - B+

Crowe's steely, soulful performance makes this one of the best revenge films to date

Transformers - BOOM!

Watching one of Michael Bay's deafening action movies makes you realise how Wile E Coyote felt when Road Runner succeeded in dropping a One Ton weight squarely on top of him from an enormous height. As reviewers and critics alike staggered out of the press screening of Bay's latest offering, suffering from the triple-whammy of tinnitus, blurred vision and sheer resentment, we resembled a coach party outing from the local head injury clinic.

Urhhhhhh. Transformers is based, ultimately, on a toy brand from the manufacturer Hasbro. There. I've said it. A toy brand. It's not even based on a computer game. That's how fantastically de-evolved the whole sorry business is.

Anyway. A toy brand. But any sense of toy consumers - ie children, with their innocence, playfulness, imagination and charm - has been chucked overboard in favour of a boorish celebration of the film's dumbest and most reactionary demographic of 15-to-25-year-olds, to whose masturbatory needs Bay caters with passionate urgency.

Transformers are an extra-terrestrial race of beings who assume the appearance of cars or other types of hardware, but then with much whirring and clanking turn into humanoid-looking giants adorned with hi-tech looking visors in place of faces, and low-tech rusty bits of metal, nuts, bolts, plates and even untransformed car tyres all over the rest of their bodies, like genetically mutated creatures from a monster truck rally.

But it's more complicated than that: as described in the publicity material, the good ones are the Autobots®, and the bad ones are the Decepticons® - and heaven help you, incidentally, if you attempt to make free with Hasbro's trademarked names. The Decepticons® are a race of beings apparently so brazen in their evil that they have consented to have the wicked concept of deception actually enshrined in their own name! Deceiving is what the other team do as well, of course, but this dissembling is limited to the morally neutral business of suddenly pretending to be a car.

Transformers both bad and good show up on earth, and one of the good ones insinuates itself into the life of an (allegedly) likable teen dork called Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), taking the form of a beat-up old car that his grouchy dad has agreed to buy him for his 17th birthday. Instantly, the car behaves like Herbie on crack, though it does facilitate his adorably klutzy wooing of a babelicious hottie called Mikaela (Megan Fox) who is supposedly a teenager but looks like Courteney Cox Arquette's world-weary older sister.

The good transformer is here to battle the bad ones, who arrive, triggering a spectacular fire-fight with US armed forces, with tanks and armoured trucks spinning through the air and crashing noisily - and I do mean noisily - to earth. They succeed in hacking into top-secret military computers sucking super-important data out of them with astonishing speed. The Pentagon recruits a super-cool army of pulchritudinous students to help them identify these cyber-attackers.

And it is at this point that Bay boldly ventures into the field of geo-political comment. One of the students wonders if Iran could be behind it. Another snorts: "It's way too smart for Iranian scientists - what about China?" Well, naturally. On the UN Index of scientists' smartness, Iran scores pitifully low, whereas the Chinese are a right old bunch of brainiacs. I and others have written about Hollywood's continued reticence about naming America's real-world enemies. This gratuitous, nervy dismissal of "Iranian scientists" comes closer than most.

Jon Voight plays the glowering secretary of state for defence, and John Turturro is an ambiguous and thoroughly unlikable operative with a secretive government agency who attempts to push our young hero around, and is duly punished by being embarrassingly stripped down to his underwear.

And so the crash-bang story continues with eardrum-perforating explosions and detonations. The Transformers fight humans, and each other. Nobody can hear themselves think. The soundtrack is at Krakatoa levels and the editing is frenzied, almost stroboscopic, so much so that you can't really get a clear look at what the Transformers actually look like.

It's all part of the sensory-overload that the great man himself delicately calls "screwing the frame". And he has outdone himself this time. In Transformers, the director and the frame have protracted and meaningful relations, and it is over two hours before Mr Bay as it were pulls on his trousers and promises to call the frame some time next week.

It won't be long before these lovebirds get back together.

Grade - C-

At its best, tolerable, at its worst, your standard Michael Bay blockbuster (bad basically)

Batman Begins - Welcome Back Bats

As the title suggests, this sets out to be radically different from the series inaugurated by Tim Burton's Batman in 1989 and trashed by Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin in 1997. Indeed, director Christopher Nolan gets even further than Burton from the camp of the 1960s TV show, to the point where you wonder how cartoonish Bat-foes like the Penguin could ever appear in Nolan's rusty, economically desperate Gotham City.

Whereas Burton sketched an Art Deco hell and shoved Michael Keaton on screen in a Bat-suit in the first minutes, Nolan puts off the moment when Christian Bale dons the mask for almost an hour. Influenced by the look and feel of the X-Men films, Batman Begins spends a lot of time in a world only just removed from reality before getting to the superheroics.The first act finds Wayne in a Chinese prison and a Himalayan monastery, transforming from bearded brawler to black-clad ninja as he flashes back to a lifetime of trauma that - in this version - began even before his parents' deaths, as he falls down a well and is terrorised by the bats which later inspire his night persona. Burton had Wayne's mom and pop killed by the hoodlum who would become The Joker, but Nolan reverts to earlier comics and makes the murderer a panicky no-one named Joe Chill, blurring the set-up so young Bruce and even Wayne Sr. (Linus Roache) must take some blame for the killings.

The Nolan who made Memento and Insomnia is at home with extreme psychological states - this might complete a Three Colours Of Neurosis trilogy by following memory loss and sleeplessness with phobia. It's certainly a smart move to cast the former Patrick Bateman as a Batman who always seems about to crack up. Bale even makes the old playboy-idiot act work, suggesting - as Michael Caine's dry Alfred notes - a man who needs to pretend to have fun because he might accidentally enjoy himself.

Batman maintains a secret identity, but he's recruiting an army for a war - forming alliances with Gordon (Oldman), the only honest cop in Gotham, and Wayne Enterprises' R&D man Lucius Fox (Freeman), while treating childhood sweetheart/Assistant D. A. Rachel Dawes (Holmes) as much as an informant as love interest (she takes the role played in comics by Harvey Dent, who becomes the disfigured villain Two-Face, suggesting a possible career-changing stretch for Holmes if this thread carries through).

With a city that looks less fantastical than Burton's, Nolan hits the streets and slums of Gotham to show a horrific escalation of evil that demands Batman's presence even as Gordon suggests he might make it worse; old-fashioned Mob guys (Tom Wilkinson) are edged out by masked freaks (Cillian Murphy, starily creepy even before he pulls on his Scarecrow hood) and a fanatical force run by the bastard sons of Fu Manchu and Osama bin Laden. Unlike Burton, Nolan doesn't skimp on action either, with brutal fights, vehicle chases and, in one great sequence, a mass escape from Arkham Asylum of serial killers and maniacs doped up with the Scarecrow's fear serum.

In terms of big-screen comic-adaptation triumphs, it's recently been Marvel who've been ahead (X-Men, Blade, Spider-Man); but, by learning several tricks from Marvel franchises, Batman Begins undoubtedly gets rival comics house DC back in the game.

Grade - A+

Significantly grittier than previous Bat-beginnings, this finds new things to do with, and say about, a character who's been around since 1938. In a year when the franchise watchword is "dark", this delivers the full noir with a side order of dementia.

Casino Royale - All in

The only thing missing from Casino Royale is a truly memorable theme song. Otherwise, this has almost everything you could want from a Bond movie, plus qualities you didn’t expect they’d even try for. It does all the location-hopping, eye-opening stunt stuff and lavish glamour expected of every big-screen Bond, but also delivers a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Fleming’s short, sharp, cynical book with the post-WWII East-vs.-West backdrop persuasively upgraded to a post 9/11 War on Terror.

From Goldfinger on -- especially in the Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan films -- the usual gambit has been to open with a pre-credits sequence highlighting amazing stuntwork and a larger-than-life exploit. Here, with a new actor cast as a Bond only just issued with his license to kill, we get an intense, black and white scene set in an office in Prague. Bond has just killed his first man – as shown in brief, brutal fight flashbacks which strain the 12A rating – and confronts a traitor in British Intelligence, exchanging pointed dialogue which leads to the ice-cold agent’s demonstration that the second killing is easier (‘Considerably’). The famous iris pose brings in colour, and a brilliantly-designed (shame about the song) titles sequence that highlights not an anonymous beauty but the silhouette of Daniel Craig himself.

For a few reels, Casino Royale lets the new boy settle in to what could almost be a Brosnan or Dalton movie – hard-hitting, but tinged with the fantastical. Bond goes off the map to harry the organisation of ‘banker to the world’s terrorists’ LeChiffre, with a beddable beach beauty along the way, and a thwarted attack on a super-sized jet aeroplane which could have been the climax of any other adventure. Then, with a notable click into focus, the movie segues into Fleming’s tight, twisted plot. Readers will be amazed to find the book’s most memorable scene (involving a wicker chair with the bottom cut out) is included, as is Bond’s brutal Mickey Spillane-ish last line (though, here, he doesn’t quite mean it).

Director Martin Campbell, who set a high mark in GoldenEye that subsequent craftsmen haven’t matched, returns, and regular scripters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade get Oscar-polishing assist from Paul Haggis. There are nods to tradition, with respectful Aston-Martin product placement, but also refreshing breaks from established practice. Judi Dench’s imposing M is held over, but supporting comedy characters like Q and Miss Moneypenny sit this one out. Mads Mikkelsen’s LeChiffre has a physical tic and a lethal girlfriend, but this villain interestingly has as much to lose as the hero, playing cards because he lost terrorist money and needs to make up the shortfall before his clients kill him.

There are miscalculations (a collapsing building in Venice is a gimmick too many in an emotional finale which would play better without all the noise) and audiences who just want a handsome fantasy figure might find a muscular Bond with perpetually bruised knuckles and the beginnings of a drink problem too much of a stretch. But long-running series can only survive through constant renewal. Casino Royale is the most exciting Bond film, in conventional action terms but also in dramatic meat, since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, with the added advantage of a star who finally delivers what the credits have always promised: ‘Ian Fleming’s James Bond’.

Grade - A-

Contrary to pre-release nay-sayers, Daniel Craig has done more with James Bond in one film than some previous stars have in multiple reprises. This is terrific stuff, again positioning 007 as the action franchise to beat.

No Country For Old Men - what's the most you've ever lost on a coin toss?

Depending on your take, the Coens have been off their game, under par, or basically crap of late. Of course, the devotee (easy to spot: goateed, bespectacled, Little Lebowski Urban Achievers T-shirt) might posit some notion where they were deliberately sabotaging their own reputation in some advanced form of self-mockery. Who knows? It remains tough to argue that Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers are of the same calibre as the preceding nine straight wacko-treasures (yes, including Hudsucker) that sealed their glowing rep as the hippest geeks around.

Well, this fresh in: whatever mosquito was buzzing in their ears is now a small red stain on the flock wallpaper. The Coens have rediscovered their mojo, with, dare we say it, a new maturity. There is also something back-to-basics about No Country For Old Men, adapted from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy’s violent neo-Western. It’s got Blood Simple’s dark moves, that clammy sense of death lurking in the barren Texan landscape. And being a knotted tale of crime innately wrapped up in an imposing location, it shares DNA with Fargo and Miller’s Crossing.

What surprises is how the film remains both recognisably McCarthy’s terse and sorrowful parable, and a Coens enterprise bathed in oil-black humour. Despite the fact that the brothers lift much of the dialogue verbatim from the page, in the mouths of their cast the lines sound like choice Coenisms: all jazzy syncopations or deadpan comebacks. “If I don’t come back, tell my mother I love her,” Josh Brolin’s sort-of hero Llewellyn Moss tells his wary

but perceptive wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) before he heads into the mouth of trouble. “Your mother’s dead,” she retorts. “Then I’ll tell her myself,” he sighs.

The plot is triple-headed, with the narrative shifting focus whenever one of the leads seems to be taking centre stage. We start eyeing the tremulous determination of Moss, a local hunter who happens upon the remains of a drug deal gone badly wrong. Cadavers cook in the desert sun, even a dead dog, and a trail of blood, splattered like ink along the parched ground, leads Moss to a case containing two million dollars. He elects, as all noir folk are supposed to, to take the money and run. Bad move considering the clean-up guy is Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a killer with the implacable dedication of a Terminator and the domed haircut of a psychopathic Monkee. What proceeds is a startling chase movie scattering through the border towns, grimy motels, and dry gulches of West Texas. Always two steps behind is the old man of the tale, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a lawman longing for retirement, facing an evil that he can no longer decipher. This is a new crew for the brothers to play with. Jones is a perfect fit for the weatherworn Bell: he is Texan to his core, and looks as if he is entirely the product of McCarthy’s Biblical prose. Age has granted him stillness as a performer, and he gives the movie a grace above its lashing violence. Brolin, battered from pillar to post, is the strong, doomed heart of the story. But Bardem’s is the role with flamboyant possibilities — a stone-cold killer obsessed with chance, holding lives to the random toss of a quarter. He is the embodiment of evil as blank force made breathtakingly plausible. With his Spanish accent flattened, his voice seems to come from a place not wholly human.

Those who find the Coens’ smarty-pants routines insufferable will find relief in the naturalism on show. This is not a world fastened beneath the hermetic seal of their whirligig genre-bending, but one that lives and breathes and bleeds. There is something resonant in Bell’s soulful philosophy, something tender in Moss’ love of his wife.

And we still get all the off-centre mannerisms that made the brothers so much fun to begin with. Although, silence is a tool we’ve not encountered before. Sure, Billy Bob Thornton barely uttered a syllable in The Man Who Wasn’t There, but we had his interior drawl. Here, between the bursts of visceral action, the film hangs on a terrifying soundlessness and the striking atonal power of sharp noises against nothingness: a bulb being unscrewed, a footfall on a wooden floor, the soft breath of wind over hardscrabble terrain. Even Carter Burwell’s score is defined by its imperceptibility — made up only of low groans and eerie whistles.

If the final act strikes out against formula to downplay rather than crescendo, it is true to the book. The simple satisfaction of traditional showdowns is evaded for a lyrical note that strikes both as deeply pessimistic and strangely pure. There is something of Miller’s Crossing’s noble farewell about it. Those brothers from another planet have returned to Earth.

Grade - A

Violent, poetic, gripping, thrilling and blackly funny: that’ll be the Coens doing what they do best then. Now with added humanity.

The Dark Knight - Why So Serious?

The hero is a billionaire industrialist who likes to beat people up. The only good cop in the city employs dishonest ones. The psychotic terrorist torturing civilians and chopping up criminals… Well, he’s just about the most charismatic character you’ll ever meet. Welcome to Gotham, where no good deed goes unpunished. And welcome to The Dark Knight, an anarchic, malevolent fury of a movie that takes a switchblade to the face of summer conformity and carves a work of twisted beauty out of it.

Anticipation and escalation were the key words in the build up to, post-Indy, 2008’s most hyped and combustible blockbuster. Director/co-writer Christopher Nolan has talked of making a bigger, bolder picture, unfettered by the origin-construction constraints of the still-excellent Batman Begins. The marketing has been masterful: a lesson in tease and please from 42 Entertainment (earning what must surely be the only mention of a movie’s PR firm in an Empire review; whatever, they deserve it). Then, just as the Sturm und Drang around The Dark Knight built to a frenzy came the January death of Heath Ledger. Peeks at his performance as the Clown Prince Of Crime had already prompted whispers of Oscar, of the birth of an icon. Cynics suggested his passing would boost the box office; pessimists griped that a comic-book movie could never serve as a suitable epitaph to the Brokeback Mountain star.

And — yes — as was, perhaps, always inevitable, The Dark Knight is Ledger’s movie. It is a towering performance. From his menacing, pencil-packing greeting to Gotham’s Mob fraternity (one of the most economic and effective character introductions ever), to the threat and fire he conjures in exchanges with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sexy, sophisticated brief and “The Bat-maaan”, to the Sophie’s choice surprises of the third act, he is pure, powerful, immense. A force of fucking nature. Informed by Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke and Jeph Loeb’s The Long Halloween, Ledger’s Joker is anarchy in a three-piece, a ruthless villain who cares for nothing, not even himself. His function, crafted in the hive mind of the Nolans and as Ledger plays him, is to cause chaos, to question everything, to push everyone to extremes, to show Batman there are no rules to this game.

This doesn’t mean Christian Bale is sidelined as either Bruce Wayne or his suited, re-booted vigilante. There’s no repeat of Keaton’s eclipse by Nicholson’s “I’d like eggs with that” Joker turn in Burton’s Batman. Bale is too muscular and committed for that, the Nolans’ script too evenly interested in every character in its universe. So, Batman is more conflicted than ever, still clinging to his parents’ memory but minus the scowly brooding that can make DC’s darkest hero feel like a moody teen. Now his concerns are much more immediate: how to neuter a threat that could destroy a city, how to empower a new DA without blowing his cover, how to work outside the system without bringing it down. He’s Dirty Harry with a conscience: a conscience The Joker plays like a violin.

Pre-release presumptions about The Dark Knight being the comic-book Heat are valid, if not all-encompassing. Visually the comparison is spot on, and regular Nolan cinematographer Wally Pfister deserves props: ironically The Dark Knight brings Batman out of the shadows, through a burnished, Michael Mann Chicago into a daylight noir. But while The Joker and Batman are both costumed “freaks”, they don’t completely share the McCauley/Hanna dynamic. De Niro’s criminal, for one, had principles; The Joker has none. And Mann’s film was as much about being a professional as being a cop or a criminal, meaning the characters that are most thematically similar are Gary Oldman’s hard-working lieutenant and Aaron Eckhart’s idealistic lawyer (yes, they do manage to pull off that oxymoron), who are trying to change their world without recourse to gadgets or PVC underpants.

And so on and on (it runs an epic 152 minutes), Nolan navigates through a moral maze and some pointed politicking, but without ever stinting on stunts or explosions. It is thoughtful but never dull, and the OTT action and expansion — underscored in IMAX sequences which will no doubt look spectacular on the enormo-screen are generally to its benefit, even though Nolan still appears more comfortable and engaged with interacting people than trucks and Batbikes. After a blistering opening, there’s a second act lull and a story shift not quite as elegant (or, some might argue, even coherent) as you’d expect from the director of The Prestige. But The Dark Knight is spectacular, visionary blockbuster entertainment: pretty much everything you could hope for and then some. It isn’t perfect but then, like its hero, like his late co-star, and as Nolan’s fitting tribute so ably observes, nobody is.

Grade - A+ 

Ledger’s performance is monumental, but The Dark Knight lives up to it. Nolan cements his position as Hollywood’s premier purveyor of blockbuster smarts – and the Batbike is kinda cool, too.

Cloverfield - We’re All Gonna Die! Grab Your Video Camera!

 


 

Godzilla meets the Queasy-Cam in "Cloverfield," a movie that crosses the Monster Attacks Manhattan formula with "Blair Witch." No, Godzilla doesn't appear in person, but the movie's monster looks like a close relative on the evolutionary tree, especially in one closeup. The closeup ends with a POV shot of the guy with the video camera being eaten, but the camera survives. If he'd left the camera's light on, I might have been reminded of the excellent video of my colonoscopy.

The movie, which has been in a vortex of rumors for months, is actually pretty scary at times. It's most frightening right after something Very Bad begins to happen in lower Manhattan, and before we get a good look at the monster, which is scarier as a vaguely glimpsed enormity than as a big reptile. At least I think it's a reptile, although it sheds babies by the dozens, and they look more like spiders crossed with crabs. At birth, they are already fully formed and functioning, able to scamper all over town, bite victims, grab them in subway tunnels, etc. I guess that makes the monster a female, although Godzilla, you will recall, had a baby, and the fanboys are still arguing over its gender. (Hold on! I just discovered online that those are not its babies at all, but giant parasitic lice that drop off and go looking for dinner.)
The film, directed by Matt Reeves, is the baby of producer J.J. Abrams, creator of TV's "Lost." It begins with home-video-type footage and follows the fortunes of six twentysomething yuppies. The lead character is Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who is about to leave town for a job in Japan. At a farewell surprise party, Hud (T.J.Miller) takes over the camera and tapes friends wishing Rob well, including Jason (Mike Vogel) and the beautiful Lily (Jessica Lucas). Hud is especially attentive toward Marlena (Lizzy Caplan), who says she's just on her way to meet some friends. She never gets there. The building is jolted, the lights flicker, and everyone runs up to the roof to see all hell breaking loose.
The initial scenes of destruction are glimpsed at a distance. Then things heat up when the head of the Statue of Liberty rolls down the street. Several shots of billowing smoke clouds are unmistakable evocations of 9/11, and indeed one of the movie's working titles was "1/18/08." So the statute has run out on the theory that after 9/11 it would be in bad taste to show Manhattan being destroyed. So explicit are the 9/11 references in "Cloverfield" that the monster is seen knocking over skyscrapers, and one high-rise is seen leaning against another.
The leaning high-rise contains Beth (Odette Yustman), who Rob feels duty-bound to rescue from her 49th-floor apartment near Central Park. The others all come along on this foolhardy mission (not explained: how after walking all the way to Columbus Circle they have the energy to climb 49 flights of stairs, Lily in her high heels). Part of their uptown journey is by subway, without the benefit of trains. They're informed by a helpful soldier that the last rescue helicopter leaving Central Park will have "wheels up at oh-six-hundred," begging the question of how many helicopters it would take to rescue the population of Manhattan.
The origin of the monster goes unexplained, which is all right with me after the tiresome opening speeches in so many of the 30 or more "Godzilla" films. The characters speculate that it came from beneath the sea, or maybe from outer space, but incredibly, not one of them ever utters the word "Godzilla," no doubt for trademark reasons. The other incredible element is that the camcorder's battery apparently lasts, on the evidence of the footage we see, more than six hours, maybe 12. The entire film is shot in Queasy-Cam hand-held style, mostly by Hud, who couldn't hold it steady or frame a shot if his life depended on it. Those who went to the screening apparently complained that they felt dizzy or had vertigo, but no one barfed.

Mercifully, at 84 minutes the movie is even shorter than its originally alleged 90-minute running time; how much visual shakiness can we take? And yet, all in all, it is an effective film, deploying its special effects well and never breaking the illusion that it is all happening as we see it. One question, which you can answer for me after you see the film: Given the nature of the opening government announcement, how did the camera survive?

Grade - B (Interesting blend of Sci-Fi and Found Footage)