[Skirting up to the edge of spoiling, hopefully not crossing it]

C-1. A lot of people are complaining about the behaviour of Cloverfield’s protagonists — they find it implausible that Rob and Lily and Hud and whatsername would go back to rescue Beth. So did I, at first; but I’ve found it works better if you bear in mind that all of the protagonists have, at the moment the monster attacks, been drinking for at least four hours. Does that help?

C-2. The easily-missed significant moment in the film’s coda hugely enhances its creepiness and poignancy. I won’t spoil it, except to say that its sad irony puts one in mind of Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts – “In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away/Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may/Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,/But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone/As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green/Water.”

C-2.5. In fact, on one plausible reading of the film — not original to me, but I forget where I saw it — the significant moment may be the real reason why the US government has saved and classified the tape, which otherwise contains nothing much that wouldn’t have been duplicated by a hundred thousand other cameras and camera phones. If that’s true, all Hud’s efforts with the camera are even more worthless than they already appeared to be, everything we’ve seen is simply beside the point, just something annoying for future researchers to fast forward through, and this is an extraordinarily bleak film.

C-3. If, like me, you live and/or work in a tall building with good views of Manhattan, Cloverfield will enormously enrich the mental/visual vocabulary that you use in all your future strangely consoling daydreams of mass disaster and devastation; Cloverfield has other virtues, but even if it didn’t I would recommend it for that reason alone.

C-4. Notwithstanding the above, the business with the Statue of Liberty’s head is completely lame.

IAL-1. For a man of apparent good health and relative youth, who has been entirely alone for three years, who can reasonably expect that he will never again see or be seen by another human being for as long as he lives, who can acquire absolutely whatever he wants in the way of non-perishable consumer goods, and who knows where the video stores are, Will Smith’s character in I Am Legend seems to have filled his home with remarkably few embarrassing heaps of pornography. Is this because the studio felt that it would be too shameful, that it would undermine the audience’s respect for the character? Were they scared to make him unsympathetic and ridiculous? Surely not, or they wouldn’t have made him a fan of Shrek.

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