For a movie so shrouded in mystery — the leave-'em-wanting-more teaser unveiled last summer; the oblique viral marketing campaign (“Slusho?”); the cryptic, anti-Snakes on a Plane title — the only really important question about Cloverfield (which also doubles as a description of its intended constituency) is: ain’t it cool?

The answer is a mightily qualified (more on that in a minute) yes.  For a film that allegedly cost only 30 per cent more than Chris Tucker got for Rush Hour 3, Matt Reeves’ first feature since The Pallbearer (you read that correctly) looks and sounds remarkable. The idea here is to give a digital-camera-eye account of a Godzilla-style urban smack-down — perpetrated by a right frightening, Cthulhu-ish behemoth — and the textures are utterly, surprisingly convincing. Having the monster be mostly glimpsed on the fly is coy but also effective, as is the found-footage set-up and pointed lack of exposition. If the actors employed to play its scattering, shell-shocked prey are a shade too attractive — the opening 20 minutes, which sets up the underlying amateur-cinematographer conceit and four screenwriting-workshop-stolid character arcs, looks amusingly like a Captain Morgan commercial — they still approximate goggle-eyed fear with admirable aplomb.

But — and it’s a big but, I cannot lie — there’s something cynical and even objectionable in the way these filmmakers are playing off collective memories of 9/11, as if a B-movie scenario about a gigantic, otherworldly beastie laying waste to a city were an acceptable allegory for a real-world act of terrorism. The images — explosions against the Manhattan skyline, panicked onlookers dusted with ash and debris, skyscrapers scraping together — are flatly allusive, but why? If the filmmakers’ motivation is merely to recast the Event Movie template in a more hardscrabble mode, why take these calculated stabs at our emotional buttons?

Or, if they really are trying first and foremost to evoke the nightmarish sense of violation that surfaced on that day over six years ago, isn’t a shock-and-awe blockbuster a fairly icky way to go about it? Especially one that seems to have ever less on its mind as it speeds, one sharply executed set-piece after another, towards a predictably nihilistic finish. (The ostensible humanism of anchoring the story in one character’s desperate search for a loved one scans as just one more tactic in the film’s well-stocked arsenal.)

The notion of genre filmmaking as a viable backdoor approach to parsing larger issues is valid, but the best examples — Night of the Living Dead, the first two Body Snatchers films, and last year’s sublime The Host — work because they channel, rather than package, our anxieties. However good a job they’ve done of selling it to us, Cloverfield is, finally, just product, at best disposable, and at worst mildly toxic.


    
 

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