The recent movie “Cloverfield” is a genre busting adventure in cinematography and storytelling. Some have called it “Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla”, which I think is an adequate analogy, however I think some other elements are worth discussing.30-Second Overview: Home-video style video tape is found in “former” Central Park (NY) containing this footage: Bunch of people at a party, you meet people with various connections and potential love connections. Party is interrupted by scary noises outside which happens to be a monster attacking the city and boxing with the Statue of Liberty. Panic breaks out and people scatter, chaos ensues. In the process of trying to escape/help people/find out what happened, more chaos ensues with army personnel helping people, shooting stuff, and people exploding from little monster bites, oh, and more chaos. More people die. We find out some mega-monster is causing the ruckus and it eats one of the guys operating the camera. Video camera then is taken up by the other male and female protagonists who try to escape the monster and huddle under a bridge that ends up collapsing on top of them (where they probably die, unclear), but not before expressing their love for each other. End of tape.
My take at the film-maker's message: Life is full of chaos and uncertainty and has no inherent meaning, people in authority are weak and also don’t really know what to do but relationships and finding love is the best we can hope for before we all die.
Post-modern flavor: None of us has a complete picture of what’s going on around us because we only have our own limited perspective (which is as shaky and jarring as a person holding a camcorder running down the street) or we have to trust others who either are trying to hide something from us or give us equally incomplete information.
Existential hints: Life is chaotic, (ala monsters destroying stuff and eating people and people running from or to something so fast they don’t know why) we often don’t know what is going on and must infuse our own meaning or purpose into life (ala “I love you”) otherwise its really depressing. Then we die.
So, at the end of the movie, if you were left with this shaken, unsettled feeling, yet with this tiny hint of “well, at least they got to tell each other ‘I love you’”, then I think the film maker has accomplished his goal. Movies are more than just “wow-factor” entertainment, they are stories, and stories should have meaning, and meaning is not infused by each of us individually, (ironically, that is the existential view of art) but by the author in particular. Was that the film maker’s goal? If you disagree with this interpretation, what do you think the film-maker was trying to communicate in this film?
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