Cloverfield

Matt Reeves spends the opening of eighty five minutes on a going away party. The creature is withheld, the characters introduced in the language of a home video, the camera looking at the wrong thing on purpose. The structure imposes a bargain: you will miss the biggest moments of the attack, because whoever holds the camera is running away. There is no score. Found footage logic leaves a single composed piece, Michael Giacchino’s Roar, over the end credits. Tension is built from sound design rather than an orchestral swell, and nothing cues you where to look when the frightening thing happens. The handheld approach carried a cost. Chains including AMC posted lobby warnings about the technique, and Roger Ebert named the camera for the nausea it caused. Neville Page, who designed the creature, gave it a biological rationale and conceived it as an immature animal suffering separation anxiety, which is why the destruction reads as panic rather than assault. The title comes from the Cloverfield exit near the Bad Robot office in Santa Monica. Worth it if seeing the creature only in fragments and learning events only as far as one small group knows them sounds right. Skip it if you want a full body shot, an explanation scene and a readable military counterattack.