Cloverfield: Third-Person Shooter

Movie critics like to toss around comparisons to video games as a kind of short hand for thin stories, ADD action and CG monster mayhem. The flick Cloverfield may be the first movie where these parallels may really have some weight behind them. I caught the movie earlier this week and was struck by how many moments of video game deja vu I'd felt while watching it. There's a sequence in a helicopter that reminded me of a half dozen different rail shooting levels -- the most recent example I can think of is Blacksite: Area 51. In the Midway game you're in a chopper looking down on giant monsters as they rip through a huge bridge span. The scene's been in a dozens of games. The only thing missing from the similar sequence in Cloverfield was the mounted chain gun and the trigger button.

Minor moments aren't all that ties Cloverfield, I think inextricably, to video game storytelling. There's something inherent to the movie's reality TV gimmick that makes it feel more like a game than any movie I've ever seen. The movie is a series of continuous shots. Most filmmakers save the long shot for special occasions -- scenes that need added immediacy. Cloverfield has only a handful of edits: moments when, for one reason or another, the camera stops shooting. Otherwise, the flick is one long string of extended shots. The camera rolls and rolls as the action happens, rarely pausing for breath, almost never missing a moment.This is how we experience nearly every video game we play. The only difference is how the camera is handled.

The Cloverfield camera is handled by an amateur. He's in the middle of the action. Because of this the camera (and our perspective) gets knocked around quite a bit. That's a far cry from the steady camera work of Lakitu. When I think about the third-person video game camera, I always think back to Super Mario 64 and that moment when Mario walks up to a mirror and we see Lakitu, the bespectacled turtle, floating on a cloud, dangling a movie camera from a fishing pole. In my mind Lakitu is the default cinematographer of all 3rd person video games. Part of me thinks that it was the introduction of Lakitu that made games too complicated for the average player. Because when we're playing Super Mario 64, we're really responsible for two characters. We move Mario around. And we have to keep tabs on Lakitu to make sure he's giving us the shot that we need. These new perspectives complicate things. Are we Mario? Are we Lakitu? Or are we the camera that Lakitu is dangling?

If you're even remotely sensitive to motion sickness it's hard, when watching Cloverfield, not to feel like the oft jostled camera. But we're also meant to relate to the cameraman himself, Hud (either a stealth reference to video game 'heads-up displays' or the Paul Newman movie). Hud's contribution, besides lugging the camera halfway across Manhattan, is to bring a secondary love interest into the picture -- probably my favorite part of the movie. The flick's "A" story is about Rob, the guy whose going-away-party gets interrupted by the monster attack, and his subsequent quest to save his girlfriend. But the more interesting subplot, where Hud crushes on Marlena (played by Mean Girls starlet Lizzy Caplan) reminded me more than a little of Half-Life 2: Episode 2.

There's a sort of pairing off that happens in Cloverfield. And Hud, the camera guy, finds himself matched with Marlena -- a girl he'd been admiring at the party before everything went to crap. These quieter moments feel more first-person, because, even though we're looking through the camera lens and not Hud's eyes, we're practically in Hud's skin when he hits on Marlena. Later when she leaps out of the darkness to save Hud's hide from alien creeps, it's hard not to see the parallels between Marlena and Alyx Vance, the kick-ass love interest/sidekick in Half-Life 2. I can't speak for other people, but I'm pretty sure I formed a crush on Alyx because of 1) proximity, 2) peer pressure (her father and Professor Kleiner practically begged us to propagate the species) and 3) she was the first video game character I didn't need to babysit. Hell, she saved my hide more than a couple times. Cloverfield's Marlena practically wields a crowbar.