cine + octo = boo

Cloverfield Beast

Originally uploaded by Weas Frikis

i’m lying in bed, fully aware that my day is going to be crammed with events, and that i need my sleep — yet i cannot stop thinking about Cloverfield.

to say it was a lean film is an understatement, but don’t let that fool you. so much is crammed into it’s runtime and yet it manages to sprint by at such a potentially disasterous speed. how is it that I come to feel for this people, let alone empathize with them?

simple. Cloverfield has aready happened to us, so when those touches occur, we relate and react with a sort of involuntary pull.
“is it a monster movie?” sure, the kind where the unthinkable happens to you and everyone around you without any full understanding of simple things like “why,” “what,” or “who.”

Cloverfield is horrific, not because the monster is somehow revolutionary, or the effects are so terrifyingly real that it shocks you to the core (neither of these are true, btw. nor should it matter). instead, Cloverfield is consuming because we’ve each experienced our version of it already, and that truly was terrifying.

the film is like a stream of conscious 9/11 fever dream, the kind your mind could concoct while trying to process the unthinkable.

the characters aren’t anything special, in that they are ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. i bought their connections, their motivations, and the premise that brought them together.

and then there’s that timecode. utter genius in that the very act of documenting some monstrous force pile ruin atop everything we’ve come to know and love means at once destroying the memories of a time when things were simple and happy — before the attack changed us all.