You get that on camera? Please tell me you got that on camera.

The advertising to Cloverfield soured me deeply. First, I saw the partying montage. Movies that showcase people my age sipping drinks, charismatically sharing vapid observations, and hooting because they're still under thirty and can afford 12 dollar martinis fill me with dread and loathing. Having worked in an upscale downtown bar for just shy of two years now--and having been to my fair share of those kinds of parties on the other side of the bar--it's easy to recognize that these montages capture not a fraction of their energy. Directors stupidly film young hardbodies being rowdy and pounding drinks, set to a contemporary hip soundtrack, and then feel as if a demographic they don't understand, but desperately wish to fleece, is being reached. What they capture is more like a Bret Easton Ellis novel without the melancholy or the menace, leaving only that oily calorie-free feel we haven't been able to shake since the 80s.

Second, it just seemed like a derivative creature vehicle where you never really see the big bad monster, and are locked into seeing through the jerky lens of characters you ultimately feel ambivalent towards. I didn't want to see yet another movie where I was waiting to see obnoxious young flesh sacrificed for my morbid gratification. Blood for Baal should have some aesthetic underpinnings, yes?

Which is all to say, I put off seeing it until tonight, and came very close to waiting for the DVD release to catch it. I'm glad I didn't wait, as this movie was not made for the small screen and I fear it will not translate well to it. If you haven't seen it in theaters yet, go now. Cloverfield is a lean thriller at one hour and 24 minutes, and registers with a level of intensity uncommon to the PG-13 rating. It's thoughtful without trying to be, effortlessly injecting homage and satire without pretense or heavy handedness. It's a movie you can appreciate on virtually any level you so choose; its approach to horror, sentiment, statement, and overall technique are refreshing and solid.

I never got much attached to the characters as people, I suppose. Nevertheless, I felt a level of intrigue about their situation, which I suspect was the intent. When I think about Hud, Rob, Marlena, and Lily, I have the same feelings for them and their personalities as I have had for former pets. I noted their respective clumsiness or grace, temperament, loyalties, and a general sense of their ability to relate. You feel a sense of affection for the characters as you would a pet who may occasionally disappoint, confuse, and annoy you, but maintain a feeling throughout that they don't deserve to be eviscerated. It's a moral way to prop up a genre film that can't afford to be much concerned with exploration of character. The film is preceded by a Department of Defense record card, identifying what we are about to see as part of some government dossier. Though Blair Witch ultimately uses the same idea of the "found video record," the framing of the record in context largely dictates where the audience's interest lies. With Blair Witch we want to know what happened to the characters, with Cloverfield we want to know what happened to Manhattan.

Though the camerawork is all handheld digital and diegetically grounded, it doesn't frustrate as much as Blair Witch did. If anything, the surreality of scenes play out more meaningfully because of the technique. When Manhattan is first being terrorized people take to the streets trying to find out what all the explosions and power outages are about. As they stand around gaping, suddenly the head of the statue of liberty falls from the sky and bounces down the street, killing several people in its wake before it rolls to a stop in front of a crowd. Some people start to flee, but the majority of the crowd all take out their cellphones and start taking pictures and video of the extraordinary event. I really enjoyed this salient element of the movie: people being fatally drawn to document the horror that was playing out all around them--indeed, the movie as video document itself is presumably the most obsessively comprehensive civilian record. The video was intended as a record of a going away party, and not of the Cloverfield Monster, the significance of which is questioned by almost everyone in attendance of the party, but remains somehow understood as... well, what you do now that everyone owns video cameras. Cloverfield is the natural conclusion to a society that is now full of boring amateur documentarians who are beginning to experience their lives as if they're a reality TV show.

The act of photographing a thing also changes how one experiences it. I was reminded of what Tom Savini, the make-up artist for Romero's zombie movies, had said about his experiences in Vietnam photographing mutilated, dead and dying bodies: the vision of that body horror was filtered through the lens, turning it into an object seemingly outside of reality, rather than an environment he was walking through. Dissociation through the photography. I realized that during the film, I was vacillating between experiencing the feeling of being on that street downtown witnessing things firsthand, and witnessing it in that location but from behind the camera myself. It was something I'd never experienced before in the theater, which both surprised and elated me. It wasn't like any kind of Hitchcockian use of voyeurism which claustrophobically ensnares you in a moment of terror. The fright in Cloverfield is borne of awe which comes with the strange intellectual space to recursively analyze itself.

Finally, the filming of the Cloverfield Monster is fantastically manipulative. Each time we catch glimpses of the monster it seems different in some way. Early on it seems reptilian, then it appears more insect like, then it looks something more akin to a mutated golem, until by the end of the film we see him up close and learn how all these fragmented impressions add up into something more coherent. The technique combines the best of both worlds, in that the more you see of the monster the more questions you have about how it moves and behaves. Any child that sees this film will be sure to have a lot of nightmares featuring his or her own mind's eye version of the monster.

As I left the theater it felt as if I'd seen Godzilla, Aliens, and Open Water simultaneously. Although the film does tip its hat frequently to Blair Witch, it utilizes the same filming technique to achieve such different and vicariously diverse ends to hardly justify the comparison.