"I’ve slept with your girlfriend."

Film Ever the contrarian, I once sparked an argument with someone by suggesting that the Hollywood Godzilla was a more entertaining film than the original, leading to the kind of raised voices usually reserved for a conversation which begins with the phrase “I’ve slept with your girlfriend”. I’d like to think says more about him than me, but genuinely Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla remake is really quite underrated. Sure it loses something in the last half with the introduction of the second lizard and the potential Godzookys, but the jokes are good, the performances fine and it’s not often a capture plan includes piling up fish in the middle of the street. By the time The Blair Witch Project was a released a couple of years the later, the big lizard film was on dvd and I had the brainwave that someone should make a sequel or a low budget remake in which the monster was hardly seen, but we tracked some kids in the aftermath, enjoying the immensity of the thing, even as their friends were being eaten or squashed by falling masonry.

Cloverfield, is of course, that film. Sort of. If you’ve not seen it yet I’d stop reading now because a work with such a slender running time (barely seventy minutes plus credits) is inevitably going to be spoilt by any attention. I’ll just say that it is good, if not quite brilliant, but certainly entertaining (there’s that word again) and the first person perspective is the finest thing about it. Gone? Good. Now, I’d actually waited for the dvd release of this too, and I’m sure I saw it under the best circumstances, late last night on my tv, hiding under the duvet. Some aspects of the artifice is exactly as I imagined -- the government warnings in the opening shot and the description of the source, economically suggesting what is to come by saying what we’re about to see was found in the area formerly known as Central Park. The editing style feels authentic too, with the rapid jump cuts between shots and scenes to give the impression of not being edited at all. And even though it’s ten years since Blair Witch and it should feel dated, the device of the camera filming the party and aftermath is clever and authentic – I’ve been the cameraman Hud, the irritating idiot who doesn’t know when not to be pointing the camera in someone’s face and I’ve even tried to use it to chat up girls, not recently mind, when I was at school.

It’s just a shame this attention to detail isn’t continued through the rest of the film, the mood of which is largely ruined by the quality of the image, or more specifically its crispness. The film I’d envisaged looked like it was shot on a camera phone or a camcorder, and if not quite as scuzzy as Blair Witch (technology‘s moved on a bit since then) at least with a more domestic look. According to the imdb, the main footage was shot with a Panasonic HVX200 which is a fairly high end digital video camera priced somewhere in the four grand bracket and which, whilst not quite mimicking film or as good at the likes of George Lucas or Michael Mann are using to shoot features these days, is sharp enough that it breaks the reality with which we’re being presented. This was clearly creative decision; as a major release the studio clearly didn’t want something which looks as cheap as an indie film, but for me that immediately saps away some of the atmosphere, of the kind which certain helped the aforementioned spooky predecessor during its leaner moments.

The other problem is that for all its apparently experimental trappings the script is still paced and structured like a fairly typical action film, with cameraman being taken through fight sequences and chase scenes and all the running through corridors a Doctor Who fan might want. The cast are quite good overall; considering we’re introduced to a sea of unknowns, everyone acquits themselves well, and actually it’s a clever decision not so have a name actor to distract the viewer from what is to come. The aim is clearly to evoke the ‘lower decks’ style tv shows in which a bunch of guest stars carry a story, the suggestion from the off being that we really aren’t seeing the usual leads you’d find in this kind of film; John Cusack, Emily Procter and Mos Def, as a scientist, his boss and an army officer, are presumably off being set up somewhere closer to the action. But the needs of the story forces these also rans into becoming action stars anyway, even though everything else what is happening suggests they shouldn’t be, that they should be running for cover. It’s conflicted.

Cloverfield also makes the mistake of showing us the monster. True this was the case in Godzilla, but that was named after its city destroyer so it was part of the package. In my imaginary version of the film, the low budget version of the film, we hardly see the monster, if at all, just vague glimpses at the edges of camera frames, leaving the audience’s imagination to build up an sense of what it looks like. Here, so desperate are the producers to include the money shots, we see that monster completely, and like the very worst of these things it loses all of its horror and though not exactly a girl in a cat suit, just isn’t as interesting as the being we’d developed in our imaginations, and in comparison to the likes of Kong and the cave trolls from Lord of the Rings (and Gollum for that matter) seems under designed. If I’m being charitable, I could envisage that was part of the plan, to make the fantastic reasonable but really what’s the point?

Yet for all these frustrations I’d be lying if I said I didn't enjoy most of it. Despite my misgivings about the use of action it is directed very well; often after an explosion the camera will come crashing down and focus on a single seemingly random image as were left trying to guess at the implications of what we’re hearing, guess which characters are alive or dead. We don’t always know where the giant lizard alien invader thing is going to be, so it’s always a surprise when something detonates or something else jumps out from the shadows. The ending too is totally unexpected and probably the best bit, the antithesis of the likes of Godzilla and Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (which attempts much the same trick of an average Joe on the edge of extraordinary circumstances), so nihilistic and depressing, and probably only achievable with these unknowns. Would Tom Cruise have been condemned to this fate? Don’t answer that.