Rob (Michael Stahl-David) should have left a day sooner. Then he wouldn’t have had to discover the woman he loves, Beth (Odette Yustman), is dating someone else at the somewhat unfocused and chaotic farewell party thrown for him by his well meaning brother Jason (Mike Vogel) and his sexy girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas). Sure he’s got a great job waiting for him in Japan, but even that can’t change the fact he’s going to jump on a plane in the morning with a debilitating broken heart.

The Statue of Liberty loses its head in Paramount Pictures' Cloverfield

Then there’s that other reason it would have been nice to leave a day earlier. You see, some sort of large monster has decided to choose Rob’s last night in New York to rain chaos and destruction down upon the city, and nothing anyone can throw at the beast can stop the thing from turning the Big Apple into a bloodily wretched core.

With Jason, Lily, best friend Hud (T.J. Miller) – who decides to film the rest of the night for posterity – and new acquaintance Marlena (Lizzy Caplan) by his side, Rob forgoes joining the exiting masses and instead heads straight into the Manhattan danger zone in order to save a trapped and wounded Beth. But time, options and means are quickly running out for the group as the military’s battle with the creature grows worse by the second, and if they don’t get to the wounded girl soon none of them are going to make it out of the city alive.

Cloverfield is a silly movie. Let’s just get that out of the way right from the start. Producer J.J. Abrams, director Matt Reeves and writer Drew Goddard have taken films like Godzilla and It Came from Beneath the Sea and thrown them into The Blair Witch Project meat grinder. It is not a film full of profound insights or deep meditations upon the human condition. It isn’t going to move audiences to tears or produce in them some philosophical wisdom they didn’t know they possessed.

What it is going to do, and do brilliantly, is scare the hell out of them, which is really all this lean, mean, terror-fueled machine has to do. Playing on our inherent fears fueled by a world caught up in a maelstrom of terrorism and war, Reeves and company place us squarely inside an unknowing scenario freakishly spiraling out of control. We are as clueless and as frightened as the protagonists, comprehending just as much (or is that just as little?) as the scant few survivors do by the time all is said and done.

Without a doubt, this is the best post-9/11 paranoia piece I’ve seen so far, and the main reason for this is that this film is able to use its Harryhausen inspired storyline to subtly evoke those fears in a safe and manageable way. By using old-school monster movie conventions Cloverfield doesn’t attempt to explain the irrational world we live in but it does give it a face (and a set of teeth, a slew of menacing claws and a bunch of carnivorous youngsters ready to rip you to pieces) and by doing so becomes both viscerally disturbing and oddly comforting all at the very same time.

Listen, it goes without saying no one involved with this is directly making any sort of political commentary, but it is equally obvious that scenes of billowing clouds of smoke hurtling down the streets of New York and sights of buildings crashing into rumble can’t help but suggest highly painful memories just about all of us hold dear. Reeves, a close associate of Abrams since back during the pair’s “Felicity” days, has made a bold and fiercely compelling saga of pandemonium and survival, and by the time it has all come to an end I couldn’t help but feel like the thing had sprung forth from deep inside the national psyche allowing all of us to engage in conversations we might have before been too timid or afraid to comprehend let alone speak aloud. 

Don’t get me wrong, at its heart this is still nothing more than a digitally photographed handheld throwback to an era of filmmaking that’s long come and gone. But unlike those 1950’s classics which inspired it the filmmakers here don’t want to make things easy and they don’t want to make things obvious. What they do want to do is scare the living daylights right out from under you, and for a blissfully enervating fast and furious 80 minutes they do just that. No matter how much or how little you want to read into its sub-textual arguments, make no mistake at its heart Cloverfield is nothing less then a superbly delightful monster smash.

Film Rating: êêê1/2 (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  Cloverfield Theatrical Trailer