If you were wondering about the similarities between the Godzilla movies and Cloverfield, which has a mega-monster ravaging New York, it’s explained in the press release. Producer JJ Abrams was visiting Japan with his son, saw some Godzilla toys, and thought the United States needed an equivalent city-destroying behemoth. Not that Godzilla hadn’t already trashed New York in the 1998 American version of Godzilla, but Abrams had another idea soon after that.
You can see the pitch meeting: it’s Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project! That is, the story is told as if being recorded live by someone actually there. That’s really the concept that makes it new, though such a ‘subjective camera” technique goes back to way before the invention of personal video cameras and those kids in the woods. In the 1940s Robert Montgomery directed and starred in The Lady in the Lake, a detective yarn derived from the Raymond Chandler novel and all shot as if through the eyes of the lead character, private eye Philip Marlowe. This was an attempt to create a correlative for the first-person narration of the book.
Obviously one of film narrative’s essential elements is the individual point-of-view shot, but it might be going too far to describe it in the way MGM trumpeted The Lady in the Lake, as ‘a revolutionary motion picture, the most amazing since Talkies began! You and Robert Montgomery solve a murder mystery together!” The critical consensus seems to be that the film is interesting but hobbled by its central conceit; maybe this extreme, limited point of view is thrilling when you’re being shot at, but swigging from a glass of whisky looks rather bizarre.
Nowadays, with the capacity to film things as they happen given to anyone with the requisite equipment, we’re much more used to this format, and the camera has a great deal more mobility than did Robert Montgomery’s. It can even swing around and film the filmer; no one even need be looking through the viewfinder. We’ve seen a lot of news footage filmed by bystanders, and Cloverfield intentionally refers to such images — in particular, the events of September 11 2001. Again, this draws on the Godzilla movies: the first of about 30, properly called Gojiru, came out in 1954 and referred to American hydrogen-bomb tests and thus the earlier destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atom bombs.
At a farewell party for Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who’s leaving for Japan, we are at first given snippets of the lives of a bunch of young professional Manhattanites through their own banter and gossip as one Hud (TJ Miller) goes about filming them. Hud seems to be one of the asinine kind of American male, familiar from Knocked Up and the like. But almost before you can say ‘Cheers!” and ‘Bon voyage”, Manhattan is under attack from the Godzilla-like monster, and we’re on the run with the protagonists — Hud filming all (or most of) the way.
It’s reasonably exciting, but it’s not particularly frightening. The monster, when we see it, is medium-scary; its offspring (or some kind of tick creature it drops here and there) are perhaps more so, but we don’t get an awful lot of those. The camerawork is so jiggly and blurry and dimly lit that it would make a hardened sailor seasick. In fact, it indeed looks like no one was looking through the viewfinder for much of the film. It must have been quite a task to keep that ultra-hand-held effect while also getting all the computer-generated destruction working, and in that it’s impressive. Cloverfield will make a decently diverting DVD rental in a few months’ time.
Its title, by the way, has no special significance. According to queries and discussions on the Internet, it was originally the working title, deliberately irrelevant to keep the movie’s contents secret, and it sort of stuck. So there you have it.
1408 is also a slightly mystifying title, which might confuse some potential viewers into thinking it’s a historical movie along the lines of 1492: Conquest of Paradise. Perhaps about something late in the reign of King Henry IV of England, who was much plotted against? History records that he suffered a strange illness in June 1408 — But, no, the title actually refers to Room 1408 in a posh hotel in New York. This is also about monsters in Manhattan, but they are more psychic than Godzilla.
Based on a Stephen King story, 1408 is about Mike Enslin, a writer of guidebooks specialising in allegedly haunted hotels. Most of the time it’s just a legend. But he himself is, naturally, haunted — as we shall see. When he hears about this mysterious Room 1408 he has to test it. Despite the dire warnings of a somewhat Mephistophelian manager (Samuel L Jackson), he is determined to spend the night in that very room.
John Cusack plays the writer, and the room is rather like the polar opposite of the wish-fulfilling planetary entity in Solaris. It makes all sorts of bad things real. These phantom events body forth inner traumas suffered by the protagonist, with lots of special effects to make you and Cusack jump. The visuals are extravagant, but the traumas that haunt Mike do turn out to be rather regulation-issue. 1408 doesn’t go very deep into the inner psychic terrors any human may suffer. In that respect, it’s less than universal and thus less disturbing.
Still, Cusack is always watchable (though he appears to be getting a bit jowly). His Mike is appropriately downbeat and cynical, and Cusack makes his inner pain credible. That’s all the inwardness one is going to get in 1408: it is, after all, about pain being externalised, which I suppose makes it a weird kind of correlative of Oprah or Dr Phil.