Cloverfield Review (Spoilers)

If there’s one thing J.J. Abrams did right with Cloverfield, it’s take advantage of multiple avenues to tell a story. For someone to walk away from this experience with some sense of closure or resolution, they’ll need to watch the film, traverse the official website, read countless blogs, listen to their friends’ interpretations, and theorize, themselves. Without all of the extra effort, “Slusho!” and “Tagruato” would have no significance. Click here for a mirror of Tagruato.jp, before it was taken down.

First of all, Slusho! comes from one of the many titles Cloverfield adopted during production, to throw off scoopers, allegedly. Interestingly enough, Slusho! is the first in a serious of breadcumbs planted to establish some backstory, outside of what could be extracted from the film. All we know from watching the movie is one person’s perspective from ground-level. We know that Jason was wearing a Slusho! t-shirt, that Rob was going to take a job in Japan as a company’s Vice President, that while Rob and Beth were on the Ferris Wheel, an object fell into the ocean, and that the monster that attacked their city may still be alive.

What further research will tell us is that the monster, in fact, did survive, Slusho! is a company that distributes a highly addictive slush whose ingredients are mined from the bottom of the ocean, and that they operate in conjunction with Tagruato (a drilling company established in 1945, after Hiroshima and Nagasake were levelled by the Atomic bomb), the same company Rob was to become vice president of. We also learn that Slusho!’s slush contains an ingredient that turns small fish into whales, and that they awoke the Cloverfield monster before it went on a rampage in NYC. This brings about even more speculation. Was the monster unleashed? How much did Rob actually know about the incident? Was he a pawn or a catalyst? Did his brother really die? How did the tape survive the hammer down? Did the monster grow that large from consuming the deep sea ingredient, or did Slusho! initiate the transformation? Did the object that hit the ocean fall, or was it dropped? Why? More importantly, how did these facts about the film surface on the internet, and are they anything more than theory?

Without a brilliant marketing campaign, and tons of hype, Cloverfield would not have generated such a devoted cult following. If you want to read up on a similar phenomena, Google “Lost Season 4.” Whatever is planned for the sequel, Abrams and crew have found way for the story to write itself. By the time you read this article, hundreds of websites for Cloverfield will have sprung up. Writer’s strike? Who cares.

I thought the entire easter egg-hunting experience was intriguing, but the movie, as it stands on its own two feet, disappoints. Hype can be a double-edged sword. In most cases, a movie doesn’t live up to the expectations established by the trailers. In Cloverfield’s case, it’s a mixed bag. When the first trailer came out during Transformers, the focus was around the victims of a natural or man-made disaster. Explosions rocked the screen, screams pealed over a frantic crowd, and everybody was left in the dark. Around the time of the second trailer’s release, the focus was less on the people, and more on what was causing the devastation. Sources leaked out that it was a monster movie. Now, more and more of the audience was speculating on where the monster came from and how it was created. Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t really do much to answer those questions. Rather, it raises even more. The movie delivered, hands down, but the filmmakers chose to present Cloverfield from a very narrow point of view. All we have to guide us is a tape recovered from the site, and one hell of a mystery. In conclusion, to really enjoy project Cloverfield, a person needs to see it as one piece of a large and intricate puzzle, in which, the fun is in the experience of putting it all together. 4 out of 5 stars.