Is Cloverfield a Bad Found Footage Film?

[Winter]

I'm gonna say yes, it is. I'm not saying that Cloverfield is a bad movie, it's a great movie, one that created one of the most iconic American Kaiju films of all time but as a Found Footage film, it's honestly really bad.

For me, the gold standard of all found footage films is The Blair Witch Project. I honestly thought this was real, that this was a real event with real people who really died and the ending of the film was TERRIFYING. So terrifying that I spent days trying to find out if the film was real or not and when I didn't get any answers it REALLY fucked me up. I spent a whole year uncertain if I saw a snuff film that was officially produced by some sickos studio heads.

Even knowing what I do now the film STILL feels real and there are a number of factors to that. The fact that the dialogue was mostly improvised, scenes that weren't filmed because the characters didn't think they were important enough to film and coming up with a convincing reason as to why these people are recording all this.

And the fact that the film is so poorly shot because it was the actors who were filming most of this.

The Blair Witch Project feels real while Cloverfield feels like a film.

Again, a good film but I never once bought that any of this was real. I don't look at this film and see real people I see actors playing their parts. I don't hear people talking I hear characters reading from a script. I don't see a monster that could be real I see a movie monster made for the film.

Here's the key difference between Blair Witch and Cloverfield, the characters in Blair Witch are people recording their own fall into madness and their eventual deaths, the character recording things in Cloverfield is the camera man trying to get the best shot.

I think what really cements Cloverfield as a bad FFF is both films scenes where the main character talks into the camera to address whoever finds the camera.

This is the scene from The Blair Witch Project

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m_lqGnLtWA

And now here's Cloverfield's version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ibWJnY6Ur8

See the difference? One is shot in such a way that is rather amateurish, with the camera being so close to Heather's face and often a close up of her nose. The other gets the actor's full face into frame so we can clearly see him. And this is where I have to again praise Heather Donahue's performance, she's confessing her to mistakes while she comes to realize that she is going to die.

The one in Cloverfield is really just an exposition dump that basically recaps the whole film that ends by cutting back to the characters when they were happy.

One feels real the other feels like an actor playing a part.

I don't mean to belittle Cloverfield as it is great but it would have been better as a regular film and not as a found footage film. Mike is barely a character in it, you could cut him from the film and it would change nothing as he has little to comment on and doesn't really do anything besides record and it takes me out of the film.

Blair Witch made this work, Cloverfield doesn't.

[CharlesPhipps]

I dunno, while I agree with most of what you say, I think the fact it is a found footage movie about a Kaiju is better than so many other rehashes.

[Winter]

I dunno, while I agree with most of what you say, I think the fact it is a found footage movie about a Kaiju is better than so many other rehashes.

I'm not sure, I think if you changed this to a more traditional film I doubt it would change anything. I mean think of the other Cloverfield films, they're not found footage and one of them is great.

Really what made Cloverfield such a hit was the early marketing. The iconic poster of the Statue of Liberty decapitated and the teaser trailer showing what happened to her head and no name given to the film. The later marketing wasn't as good but keeping the monster hidden was a smart move as people had to see the movie just to see what the monster was.

Had the film been regularly shot instead of FF it likely would have been just as much of a hit. About the only shot that I think truly benefited from the FF part is the final shot of Clover which could only work as Found Footage but that's about it.

[CharlesPhipps]

I'm probably not the audience for that argument because I never bothered to watch any of the sequels because they weren't found footage or kaiju films.

I thought the idea of portraying Godzilla or Cthulhu as a natural disaster was the only clever idea from what I saw of the franchise.

[Madner Kami]

Cloverfield makes you too aware of the footage being engineered and it's painfully inconsistent.
For example, the footage often implies that it was caught on literal tape, yet scene-switches are accompanied by an effect that implies digital footage, rather than analogue.
Then the camera behaves inconsistently. There's the scene right at the end, where the cameraman is killed by the monster and ends up lying dead right in front of the camera. The camera starts trying to autofocus and being incapable of deciding whether it wants to focus on the background or the dead (but unharmed) face. This "pumping" is typical for digital cameras, if the set focal point (usually the center of the recording, unless specified otherwise) can not be focused, either because it is too close or because the objects in the focal point are moving in ways that necessitate a refocusing (e.g. a gras blade in the fore-ground moving into the focal point or the focused object leaving the focal point). But nothing of that sort happens. The face is right smack dab in the middle and static. There should be no "pumping". Besides which, the camera not once through the entire film, shows this behaviour, which it would frequently, given how the remaining footage of the movie is practically constantly moving things in and out of the focal point, which would cause any camera left in auto-focus (as implied by this scene) to constantly refocus, yet not once does it happen, if memory serves right, except here, where it's clearly a cinematographic choice, presumbly made by the cameraman... who lies dead in front of the camera...
And then there's camera-location. More often then not, the angle the camera presents implies it being shoulder-mounted. There's a myriad of shots where holding the camera like that (or at all) is beyond practical or sensible (e.g. running and still somehow holding a remarkably clear and stable focus or, my personal favourite that I still recall, two people carrying a wounded man out of crashed helicopter, where one person carries the wounded by the legs and the cameraman quite clearly carries the wounded at and with both arms and yet somehow still holds the camera at his own eye-level... with his third arm?). Also, a shoulder-mounted camera is shoulder-mounted because it's heavy. There's a ton of moments where nobody in their right mind would keep carrying that thing and yet, they do. For example, cameraman dead, camera at his face. Next scene, the other two people from the group filming themselves underneath a structure. Did they stop running away from the monster that just chewed on their friend, to go and get that camera?!

In short: Cloverfield is an infuriating mess of manufactured "found footage", even for an eye that is not aware of the technical details. It constantly keeps you aware of it's fakeness.

[Nealithi]

If Blair Witch is the gold standard. Then yes Cloverfield is lower on the scale.

But how many Found Footage films are there to scale?

[Winter]

If Blair Witch is the gold standard. Then yes Cloverfield is lower on the scale.

But how many Found Footage films are there to scale?

I think the original Quarantine film is up there and I'd even argue that M. Night Shyamalan's The Visit is pretty solid as a FF Film. I will admit that it might have been a bit unfair to compare it to Blair Witch as even that film's sequel, confusingly titled Blair Witch (really couldn't come up with a subtitle?), had the same problem.

Really most found footage films all fall into the same trap, they really could just be a regular film while Blair Witch was a film film that was made with Found Footage in mind. But Cloverfield stood out to me more because it felt like a film that was designed to be shot in a more traditional way before switching over to Found Footage.

Honestly I think one of the better found footage stories I've seen was in the TV Series Supernatural which was more of an affectionate parody of the genre but it was clear that it was made with the idea of it being a Found Footage Episode first, even using that fact to it's advantage as the camera would jitter every time a ghost showed up.

However, one thing I've notice that has never been repeated in any FF project is the sense of this being real. The thing that makes The Blair Witch Project so terrifying is that it could be real as nothing explicitly supernatural happens throughout the film. Just about everything that happens in that film COULD really happen and most of the stranger parts of the film aren't outside the realm of reality.

A Witch Could be stalking them or it could be some regular people stalking and eventually killing them. Reality could be warping around them or maybe they're just going in circles. Even the house at the end, it could the Rustin Parr's house or it could just be some random house in the middle of the woods.

Every Found Footage film or episode I see makes it clear that there is something supernatural or something else going on. This isn't a criticism as it makes sense, the magic trick that Blair Witch pulled off will never work again so better to just make it clear what's going on and just roll with it.

The point moving forward isn't to try and trick people this is real the point is giving us a more Speculative event in the most believable way possible and Found Footage is best suited for that.

My problem with Cloverfield is that the Found Footage part is unconvincing to me. I don't believe for one minute that this is real and I keep thinking, this would be better as a regular film.

[Madner Kami]

My problem with Cloverfield is that the Found Footage part is unconvincing to me. I don't believe for one minute that this is real and I keep thinking, this would be better as a regular film.

Without the FF-angle, it would just be another Kaiju-movie that isn't Godzilla but tries to be the original Godzilla. You need the changed angle (FF) or setup (like in Pacific Rim), to make it interesting and it utterly fails at that, because it doesn't treat the angle-change serious. It's artificial FF that keeps you aware of it's artificiality and that's precisely what you want to avoid FF to look like, because the appeal is the "closeness to reality" of FF, the exact lack of manufactured pictures. Queue myriads of shakey-cam action movies doing the exact same bullshit, which regularly recieved tons of hate, for good reason.

[Nobody700]

I'm gonna go with PointlessHub on why the found footage aspects works

Cause in most of these, the camera man HAS to be an ASSHOLE. It's the only reason they carry that damn camera everywhere instead of helping. Thus, how is the Cloverfield found footage guy an asshole?

TJ Miller.

[Thebestoftherest]

I don't think the fact they seem to not be sure what the lore is.