Cloverfield

Cloverfield arrives as a thoroughly apolitical artifact, a found-footage creature feature so singularly focused on the mechanics of spectacle that it barely acknowledges the world beyond its own destruction. The cast includes actors of varying backgrounds, but this reflects nothing more intentional than the demographic reality of New York City in 2008. The film has no interest in what its characters represent, only in how they run from things. The entire enterprise is devoted to answering a single question: what would a monster attack look like through a handicam, and does it look cool. Everything else is subordinate to that interrogation.

To score this film against contemporary markers of cultural consciousness is to engage in a kind of archaeological exercise, measuring the distance between 2008 and now. Cloverfield predates the crystallization of modern progressive sensibility in mainstream cinema by several years. It wants nothing from you but your attention to its spectacle. There are no lectures, no agenda, no consciousness of representation as a thing worth examining. The female characters exist, perform their function in the narrative, and sometimes do not survive. This is presented without commentary or self-awareness. The film does not grapple with class, does not question capitalism, does not contemplate the climate, does not celebrate bodies or minds in any particular configuration.

What we have here is a creature feature untouched by the preoccupations that would come to dominate discourse in the years following. Its innocence of contemporary concerns is almost refreshing in its totality. Cloverfield is pure, unadorned action cinema, interested only in visceral impact and the particular terror of watching something unknowable destroy everything around you. It is, in every measurable way, a film from another era.