For those unfamiliar with this term--- Macguffin refers to something: an identity revelation, a seeing of something heretofore unseen by a viewer.. etc etc.. upon which a movie's plot hinges. Macguffins might be called the already pulled-pin grenades of the advertising and the constructing-of-movie plots. They are so dangerous but can be so very effective.

This entire whole movie's PREMISE was a Macguffin. For a good two months online and in trailers at theaters we saw nothing but the iconic decapitation of the Statue of Liberty's head , and a release date. We were given NO clue what " Cloverfield" actually means. ( And in a non-spoiler spoiler, we never find out either.) Was this an aliens attack movie? A monster movie? Well, what is it? And once I find out.. will I care?


THAT last clause is the lynchpin about the dangers of Macguffins folks. If you build it up so incredibly, then don't deliver anything as remotely interesting as the suspense created throughout said build up , you then run a VERY high risk at alienating the audience.

But in some sort post-ironic brilliance.. this movie DOES have kind of a laughable Macguffin.. but by the point you realize it and see it, you are so engrossed that you don't care !!

There doesn't need to be a super-detailed overview of what goes on in this movie-- because it's definitely one of those movies that can be explained in two sentences ( Hence one reason I thought J.J. Abrams and crew came up with all the niftily inventive ambiguous advertising build up. )

Here is the premise in a nutshell-- a lot of Manhattan late/20 early 30 somethings are having a party for one of them getting a new job overseas. ( Another plus : when all the reviews that came out about this movie saying these people were all such self-involved d****bags, I was prepared to hate all of them even before they came on the screen. They are a BIT like this, but i didn't hate them nearly as much as I was afraid I was going to .) These " characters" -- I put that in quotes because these folks are really pretty much just archetypes-- this isn't one of those movies I think anyone in their right mind who KNOWS anything about movies is going to go to looking for in depth study of the personas-- get their party first interrupted ( a party that one of the folks is videotaping for posterity for the fellow that is leaving ) by a power outage....

And then , it begins.

Is NYC under a terrorist attack? ( the 9/11 memories definitely stuck in the viewer's mind adding a very intense sense of scary verisimilitude.) Is there an earthquake? Is there some sort of nuclear bomb dropping? Or is there.... ( dum--da dum dum )

A monster???

Of course in this modern post-Godzilla day and age .. even the IDEA of " monster attack "" movie is most likely going to illicit chuckles from everyone-- so there is NO way this movie can work is it? Shockingly, the answer to that question is yes!!

I didn't have to pay to see this movie, so my expectations were pleasantly low, thinking this would just be a somewhat silly way to pass the time. But what I encountered while I watched this was actually downright gripping. As NYC falls apart and everyone is running willy-nilly all over the place to escape the doom , is it just a tad silly to assume the cameraman from the party is never going to drop his camera and totally break it? Well, yes. And does the Macguffin of the first monster viewing ridiculous? Completely. ( I Will spoil this in just a jiffy but I will give you a warning about which paragraph to skip. ) But therein lies two twists/revelations that really bothered me--yet the amazing thing to the testament to the filmmakers that while these two things bothered me intensely ---they still weren't enough to shatter my enjoyment of this movie and keep me from recommending it.

These two things are :

#1 --

In a plot twist that I won't completely spoil-- one of the 20-30 somethings ( all effectively played by relative unknowns which adds a bit more sense of reality to this movie -- which is indeed told form the point of view of the government " finding" this lost tape after all the doom has occurred. ) IS indeed hate-worthy. And what that person does causes doom for most of all the rest of the main characters and there is just part of me that screamed the whole time-- HEY !! DON' T DO THAT !! If you do THAT I know all of you will die !!! Of course.. if said people DON"T follow the annoyances and then pleadings of this infuriating character-- then there wouldn't be much of a movie.

#2 ( DON'T READ THIS SECTION IF YOU DON'T WANT THE MONSTER REVELATION SPOILED )_
Later in the movie after seeing flashes of body parts of the big meanie that is stomping all over NYC -- in another of the very realistic and effective CNN sequences-- we do indeed see the whole monster. And the Macguffin risk laughably collapses. For all the effective horror and carnage we have seen, the monster looks EXACTLY like a cross between a dinosaur and one of the monsters in that old Japanese Import Ultra-Man--- and he looks more cuddly than scary. He also unfortunately looks just like a soap on a rope and the accompanying bath mitt I had when I was about 6. And I start laughing ( along with most of the audience ) going.. THAT thing is what's wrecking NYC? Oh please, what a joke. It's kind of like if King Kong ended up looking like Telly from Sesame Street.


But here again is the cute and inventive magic of this movie :

It doesn't matter.

By this point you are so engrossed by the " you are there" filmography and so are so gippingly " on the run" with the characters yourself that you don't even care that the monster itself is ridiculous looking. And if you are a movie analyst ,as I think many of us are at least attempting to be , you are just too in awe that a movie this effective was made for a these-days-shoestring of a measly twenty-five million dollars. The lighting especially as the on-the-run folk keep trying to rescue/escape/ run all over the place is incredibly impressive and as realistic as possible. The explosions of electricity going out and alternately causing small fires is so lifelike there were times I actually jumped. And if you are into that kind of stuff.. there IS an emotional pull by the time we reach the end. I again, because of issue #1 above, was so infuriated that this emotional situation had been entered into at ALL, that yours truly was so disgusted with the people left at the end that I didn't care about said attempts to touch my heart. Finally, towards the end there are some helicopter sequences of escape and attack that I swear I haven't seen done as well even in 150$ million movies.

As of this writing Cloverfiled is now out of the theaters and it will probably lose a little on the small screen-- but for a movie with so many things that could be weak.. and admittedly are-- this is still a remarkable little triumph of filmmaking from one of the most clever auteurs working in movies today.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children up Ages 8