Have you seen Cloverfield? Give us your verdict at the foot of this article

Thanks to a confluence of marketing shadowplay and creative firepower, Cloverfield – which opens in America tomorrow and in Britain in a fortnight – has become the most anticipated movie since the Star Wars prequels. The finished film, about a cataclysmic attack on Manhattan by an otherworldly behemoth, defies the lo-fi Blair Witch expectations set up by the trailer, and instead delivers a visceral, synapse-splitting monster mash that draws on 9/11 anxieties just as it pulverises the viewer into submission. It is, says its director, Matt Reeves, “an attempt to make something outrageous and outlandish like a monster movie, but to do it as if it is utterly real”. Here, then, is what you need to know about the first must-see movie of 2008:

Godzilla
It began in Japan, in the summer of 2006. On a press tour to promote his directorial debut, Mission Impossible: III, J. J. Abrams, the producer of Cloverfield, slipped into a Tokyo toy store with his son, and was overwhelmed by the amount of Godzilla merchandise on display. “He realised that Godzilla was a national icon for the Japanese,” explains Reeves. “He felt that we needed our own national monster.”

That trailer
The Cloverfield teaser, shot before production began but eventually incorporated into the final film, was the ultimate in antimarketing hype. It featured the movie’s twentysomething cast in a Manhattan loft apartment, a dinosaur roar, a decapitated Statue of Liberty and, crucially, no title. “It was inspired by the trailer for Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” says Reeves, “which was documentary-style, very stark and came from a time when people weren’t so media-savvy.”

A star-free zone
“The whole thing about this movie is that it had to play as if it was very real, as if it was found footage inside a camcorder,” says Reeves. “Casting was a key part of that. We had to get complete unknowns.”

Although the cast are novices (anyone heard of Odette Yustman? Well, you will), it helps that they casually inhabit character archetypes familiar to anyone who’s seen The Breakfast Club or an episode of Friends. The pretty one, the nerdy one, the jock, the sensitive loner – they’re all here. Only this time, led by the sensitive Rob (Michael Stahl-David), they’re in a race against time to get pretty Beth (Yustman) out of Manhattan before the beastie goes ballistic.

The title
Cloverfield is just one in a long list of titles that stood above this famously titleless movie during production (others are Monkey, Slusho, Cheese and Chocolate Outrage). The name is derived from a fake production company, called Cloverdale, set up by Paramount to throw eager set-hounding fans off the scent. Cloverfield Boulevard is also the name of a street near Abrams’s office in LA.

The viral campaign
After the trailer whipped prospective audiences into a hysterical lather, a series of fake websites created in Cloverfield HQ appeared. They promoted fake soft drinks (Slusho), reported on fake corporations (the Tagruato Corp), and suggested an ersatz world rooted in the forthcoming monster movie. It will, perhaps, be surprising to some to see how little of this superfluous narrative noise ends up in the finished film, although cocky jock Jason (Mike Vogel), brother to Rob (Stahl-David) does wear a Slusho T-shirt. But that’s all part of the wider story prism, says Reeves (see The meta-story, below).

Queasicam
The entire movie, from loft party to Manhattan midnight monster chaos, is shot from the handheld point of view of an amiable party-goer and schlub called Hud (T. J. Miller). It’s a smart move, creating an instant rapport with the action, making the monster look credible. Reeves says more is owed, though, to the iPhone generation than to any Blair Witch appreciation. “You look at YouTube and you see footage from horrible events where people happen to have their cameras or videophones with them. Our film is very much of that moment.”

The meta-story
“The movie is a stand-alone experience, and complete in itself,” Reeves says. “But there is another way to see it – it’s just one movie of the many movies that would have been made on camcorders and videophones on that one night. And those other movies, and all the stuff that’s on the net, they’re part of a larger meta-story, but they are not part of this movie at all.”

The monster
The money shot in Cloverfield comes somewhere in Act III. It’s a full frontal of the monster – no shaky cam, no cutaways, nothing obscuring it. Just 30 weeks of hype and speculation condensed into one gob-smacking visual assault. “When people saw the trailer they had a sense that we were going to use the handycam aesthetic to not show a lot of things,” says Reeves. “But that’s clearly not the case.”

Shadows of 9/11
Everywhere you look, Cloverfield screams Twin Towers. Falling buildings, floating papers, walls of dust, stairwell hysteria and final farewells are just some of the signs of a popular culture that’s still in posttraumatic shock. “The movie is not about 9/11,” says Reeves. “But it’s about the fear that’s been created since 9/11. It’s a way into those fears

The sequel?
“We have no idea. I mean, obviously it depends on how this movie does.” Reeves pauses and then adds: “We have talked about a lot of things that we’re excited about. One of the ideas, again, is about looking at another movie out there from the very same night. If you could see what was going on in another person’s videophone you’d have a whole different experience.”

— Cloverfield opens in the UK on Feb 1 2008

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