I went to see Cloverfield at a midnight show on Thursday night -- and couldn't get in, it was sold out. The theater quickly added two additional showings on two more screens, which also all promptly sold out. So I kind of knew before the movie started that it was going to be a monster hit.

It's my feeling that Cloverfield is an instant classic, and if you are at all curious about it I strongly recommend you abstain from reading anything more about it and just go see it with as innocent eyes as possible. Below the fold, I'm not going to talk so much about the movie as I am about the critical reaction to it, but still, out of respect to the moviemakers, I announce Spoiler Alert.


The idea of Cloverfield is so simple and so pure -- essentially, a remake of Godzilla by way of The Blair Witch Project -- so bone-headedly obvious that it's hard to believe it hasn't been done before. But here it is, a simple idea with a simple script, executed with such a high level of proficiency that one feels like it is nothing less than a re-invention of the Monster Movie.

Now then: not everyone is happy with Cloverfield, and I'm a little confused by some of the reactions I've been reading. The people who don't like it seem to fall into two camps: those who feel that it exploits our national anxiety regarding 9/11, and those who feel that the "gimmick" of the movie (a remake of Godzilla by way of The Blair Witch Project) is shallow and boring.

To the people who accuse the moviemakers of exploiting 9/11, I'm not sure what to say. I read one critic who took pains to announce that the writer and director of Cloverfield don't live in New York, and are therefore unqualified, somehow, to make a movie that deliberately summons the ghosts of 9/11. This I don't understand -- would it be somehow acceptable if Woody Allen or Spike Lee made Cloverfield instead (the mind reels)? Is there some geographical boundary, within which it is okay to allude to a national tragedy? If the moviemakers had lived in Florida or Pennsylvania or Missouri instead of California, would these critics have felt the same sting of offense? What if they lived in Paris, or Berlin, or Jerusalem? Would any of those cities give these moviemakers the proper license to "exploit" 9/11?

Because, I'll tell you, anybody who complains that Cloverfield "exploits 9/11" does not understand movie history. Our theaters were deluged with "important" political movies this past fall, In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs, Redacted, Rendition, and they all bombed. They all bombed because no one wants to see a movie about this stuff. That is not to say that this stuff is not important, because clearly it is, it's important to everyone. But, in order for a national trauma on the scale of 9/11 to be made palatable to a general audience, it first has to be turned into a metaphor.

Let's say you have a proud, strong, upstanding nation, and you're in the middle of a war, and every principle you were raised believing is suddenly called into question, and then suddenly your nation isn't so strong or upstanding any more, and then, out of the blue, some unbelievable, unthinkable, unholy event occurs that completely changes the way everyone in your country thinks about everything, overnight. And suddenly the future is different, and all the plans you made are meaningless, and everyone in the country is scared out of their wits and they are forced to reconsider not only their priorities but their basic assumptions about who they are and what they stand for.

Well, that's one way of looking at what happened to Japan in 1945. And there were a great many "important," "serious" movies made about life in postwar Japan, and for the most part, nobody remembers them any more. You know what they remember? Of course you do. They remember Godzilla. Godzilla was Japan's way of taking their national sense of horror, dread and unease and turning it into a metaphor that would allow them to experience and purge those feelings through a collective experience.

(Godzilla worked so well that it allowed Japan to not only experience their feelings of postwar horror, it allowed them to own those feelings. So that the horrifying monster of the first movie quickly became a defender of the homeland, and finally a comedy star. But that's a subject that could fill up a whole book.)

So it makes perfect sense that a team of intelligent American moviemakers would look at their history and say "You know what this culture needs that it doesn't have? A way to experience 9/11 in a work of art that successfully turns it into a metaphor. You know, like Godzilla did for Japan. In fact, you know what? Why don't we do a remake of Godzilla?" After that decision has been made, the other question to be asked is "How do we keep it from sucking like that last remake of Godzilla?" And the answer is, tell the story in a way that has never been done before (at least not on this scale) and yet is instantly "gettable" by a huge general public.

Now then: there are these people who seem "bored" or "irritated" by the style applied to the shooting of Cloverfield. They call it "trendy" or "shallow" or "headache-inducing." Again, I don't know what they're talking about, because I find Cloverfield to be exceptionally well written, acted and directed.

There is one critic who opined: "Not for anyone over 30," and here, I think, is the rub. There is a generational split between people who "get" Cloverfield and those who do not. The ones who do not are not content to just say "Well, I didn't like it" or "It didn't work for me," they feel compelled to call the characters insipid and one-dimensional (they are not) and the script simplistic (simple it is, simplistic it is not) and the direction one-note and grating (which, I don't even know where to begin).

In case I have not made myself clear, let me say it again: Cloverfield is exceptionally well written, acted and directed. The structure, yes, is very simple. And for the benefit of discussion, I will recount it here -- please read no further if you have the slightest inkling of seeing this movie.

Act I: A group of young people gather for a party, and there is some soap opera about who is bedding whom. Then, a gigantic monster attacks the city and our team tries to flee.

Act II: The monster destroys the most obvious point of egress from the city (why Team Human thinks Brooklyn will be safer, I don't know) at the same time as one of our guys gets a phone call from a sort-of girlfriend who is trapped somewhere uptown. So, against the tide of humanity fleeing the city, the direct orders of the military, and the path of the rampaging monster, our guys make their way uptown.

Act III: Our guys arrive uptown. Or at least most of them do. All hell has broken loose. The military is swarming the place (I don't know how they managed to lock down Manhattan and fill the streets with tanks and infantry in less than seven hours). They save their friend, they try to escape, the monster prevents them from doing so. The military bombs the shit out of the island and everybody dies. The end.

Look at that: simplicity itself. No complex character development, no stunning reversals or head-turning reveals, no subtext or deeper meanings, no intrigue, no plot complications. We simply follow a squad of humans, step by step, through a series of unique and physically grueling experiences. And you know what? That's what it should be.

I am reminded of The Poseidon Adventure (a script I adore). Poseidon also has a strong central metaphor: the ship (that is, the nation) is upside-down. On an upside-down ship (of state), who will survive? ("WHO WILL SURVIVE?" was, in fact, one of the tag lines for the promotional materials.) So we see that the captain of this ship (of state) is dead, and the purser (who is interested only in the business of the ship) tells everyone to "stay where they are" (that is, retain the status quo) and the ship's doctor leads everyone "up top" (even though "up top" is now under 90 feet of water), and it's up to the fallen priest and his rag-tag group of outcasts to figure out how to survive in this upside-down situation. And there is much speechifying and gnashing of teeth, and much melodrama about who survives and why. And I love The Poseidon Adventure but I have to wonder, wouldn't it be a much better movie if the characters stopped talking about all the subtext and let the audience enjoy the simple pleasure of following a squad of humans, step by step, through a series of unique, physically grueling experiences?  And some people live and some people die and if there are deeper meanings contained in the plot, say an examination of the national mindset, let the audience figure that out themselves.

(see, for example, No Country For Old Men.)

So, I'm sorry, where was I? Oh yes, this generational split between people who like Cloverfield and people who don't. The people who don't like it chide the characters for being "pretty twentysomethings," as if their youth and good looks is code for "let them die." The New York Times, no less, had a critic rooting for the monster to eat these youngsters. There is a whole faction of critics who hate these characters, which completely mystifies me. If they were presented as stupid or coarse or one-dimensional or fake, that I could see, but I found all the characters in Cloverfield to be genuine, warm and sympathetic. I'm 46 years old, and I know plenty of people just like this, and more than that, I think they would act pretty much like they do in the movie if, you know, a 300-foot monster came and destroyed the city. I find their interactions engaging and humorous, and would actually be curious to sit down with the moviemakers and find out how much of the finished movie is scripted and how much was improvised. Because there is an almost Altmanesque quality (yes, I said "Altmanesque" -- so sue me) to a lot of the scenes, as though they shot hours and hours of improvisations and then ended up using just 80 minutes of the best stuff for the feature. There is a wonderful looseness to the movie, which is amazing when you consider the restrictions that must have been imposed by the budget, the format and the extensive special effects.

So why are these critics so angry?  Why do they hate this movie so much? I can't say for sure, but I think it's the fact that Cloverfield is told in the vocabulary of the "internet generation." The characters live their moment-to-moment lives through multiple layers of irony, in their 21st-century kidding-but-not-kidding way, and they feel not at all weird about keeping their video camera going while the world ends.  Cloverfield distinctly captures a national moment in a way I don't think I've ever seen in a movie before.

One of the key images in Cloverfield, for me, comes when the head of the Statue of Liberty is lying in the street somewhere in SoHo, surrounded by people taking pictures of it with their phones. A giant monster has just passed through the neighborhood, but everybody is still going to take the time to get a shot of the head of the Statue of Liberty to send to their friends. The weird thing is, this moment, and dozens like it in Cloverfield, felt utterly real to me, funny and sad and scary and right, while I think an older generation, frankly, sees this kind of movie as a kind of a threat. Older critics, or critics with a pre-internet mindset anyway, see Cloverfield as an affront to their print-era sensibilities.  It's an analog-vs-digital argument, as it were.  They seem to be saying, if a team of moviemakers can make an entertainment this effective using the base vocabulary of a hand-held video camera, then what's the point of classically-structured, "thoughtful," "great" cinema?

The pity being, they can't see that Cloverfield is great cinema, in one of its purest forms. The breakthrough of Cloverfield (a breakthrough Blair Witch attempted, and failed to achieve) is to make the street-level language of hand-held video, in a way, the protagonist of the movie, to show that the simplest, most common tools are capable of delivering the most visceral of images, some extremely sophisticated levels of narrative (I could write a whole piece on how, scene by scene, Cloverfield keeps things moving by telling us exactly what we need to know and nothing else), and a rather devastating emotional impact.