It started with a trailer last summer, too cool to even have a name on it. Then months of smoke-screens, secrecy, and a shattered Statue Of Liberty, all hanging out there with the promise of more to come. The opening weekend box offices rang with the delight of seeing Manhattan getting smashed flat by a properly Americanized Godzilla.

But hype is a malicious beast, and Cloverfield, as it turns out, is a small-scale exercise. The promise is a 21st century monster movie, but the execution is neither a satisfying character story nor an exciting monster mash. The central gimmick in Cloverfield is that the film is the unedited playback of a videotape recovered in Central Park after a devastating monster attack. The film is a well-executed gimmick, but the energy expended in keeping the single-camera trick going winds up subtracting from the story, which is slim as a reed to begin with.

The film follows Young Boring Preppie (played by an indistinguishably bland actor), who is leaving for Japan (a nudging reference to the Godzilla movies). At his farewell party, his friend Annoying Preppie videotapes the events of the evening, in the process taping over a semi-romantic liaison that Boring Preppie had with Boring Girl. That way, whenever Annoying Preppie has his taping interrupted, the film can cut to Boring and Boring having a too-cute portentous flirtation.

The opening twenty minutes are coyote-dreary. The farewell party looks like an audition pen for Dawson’s Creek: The Next Generation. It takes place in a loft the size of a downtown block – if everybody in attendance was living there, then perhaps collectively they might afford the rent. The characters we meet are the too-pretty, fabulously self-assured twenty four year olds that populate Generation Z-targeted car commercials, minus the depth.

Not a minute too soon, the party is broken up by an explosion and the head of the Statue Of Liberty comes flying down the street. For a moment, Cloverfield sustains itself on the echoes of 9/11. The wall of smoke and ash that comes blasting down the street is chilling. The crowds huddling together as they flee are poignant and evocative. Then the Annoying Preppie starts to endlessly repeat that he’s going to “document what’s going on, because people are going to want to know” and turns his camera away from the destruction to watch Boring Preppie trying to get a cell phone signal.

The mis-judgement the filmmakers made here is betting that the human story can hold its own against a massive tableau of destruction. It doesn’t. By way of contrast, the Korean action film The Host took the same setup – the small scale story of a family caught up in a large scale monster attack – and turned it into a moving tale. The Host worked in part because it balanced fear, panic, outrage, panic, and heroism in equal measure. Cloverfield tilts the scales way out of balance balance and the audience is stuck with the wrong side of the stick.

The shame is that the action in Cloverfield is well staged, and the sound design is astonishingly good. It does too good a job of making you want to see more of the fun stuff and is all the more maddening because it refuses to let you turn your head to see it. The whole experience is akin to watching a videotape of someone tying their shoes while riding Space Mountain – all dark spaces, whiplash, and shining lights. It looks like something fun is going on, but the guy with the camera is too fixated on his own feet to show you any of it.

**

Hype is a funny thing. The best hype explicitly promises very little, but the fragments send your imagination racing. Cloverfield producer J.J. Abrams is familiar with that concept. He’s an amateur magician, and intimately understands the mechanics of sleight-of-hand – that the magician is manipulating the mark’s imagination instead of delivering substance.

That’s the principle behind his hit television show Lost. Dangle a tantalizing promise in front of the audience, and deliver a left turn instead. He’s creating phantoms that will never fully incorporate, and after all the grandiose expectations, there is no satisfying conclusion that can live up to the mystery. The trick with hype is to put out the promise of something, and let the audience’s imagination run wild.

With Cloverfield, Abrams is having a field day with his fan base. A wide variety of “secret” website sprouted in advance of the film:

http://www.1-18-08.com/
http://slusho.jp/
http://www.tagruato.jp/
http://tidowave.com/
http://www.jamieandteddy.com/

An obsessive reading and decoding of hidden “clues” turn the hype into a game, which is nothing more than a never-ending series of puzzle boxes. With enough digging, the story of a Japanese mining company slowly emerges, along with the story of a young, MySpace era couple. Nowhere is there any more information about the monster, or the destruction that’s looming. It’s like digging out of a sand pit – you can dig as hard as you like, but you’ll never get anywhere. If you haven’t yet lost your virginity, there’s probably a sense of fun and adventure that comes from running down an endless series of blind alleys. And if you have lost your virginity, well, then there’s probably something better you can be doing with your time.

***

I have a feeling that aesthetically, Cloverfield will neatly divide audiences in half. Most people over 25 will find the Blair Witch camerawork headache and/or nausea inducing and far too claustrophobic for enjoyable viewing. On the other side of that line are the teenagers who have grown up with YouTube, MySpace, mobile video, and every moment of their young lives tucked away on a shelf full of videotape.

The camera technique is akin to having a vise hammerlocked on your head. Your point of view is restricted, not even to just the character but to a specific fixed lens length. The unforgiving nature of the single focal point grows wearying. The cinematographer and director push this conceit as far as they possibly can,, but ultimately it is too limiting.

There’s an important distinction to make between the shaky-camera aesthetic of Cloverfield and The Bourne Ultimatum, and it’s not the camera work, it’s the editing. Both films rely heavily on a constantly moving, unstable camera. However, the editing in Cloverfield is arrhythmic and disorienting. Every edit in Cloverfield is disorienting, requiring you to re-orient yourself in time. Every time the film edits, you’re lurched forward into an unknown space and the audience is behind the narrative.

The editing in Bourne is chronologically continuous – even when cutting from one blurred action to the next, time isn’t disrupted with every edit. The action can unfold fluidly, and every edit pulls the audience forward, positioning them closer and closer to the action to create a sense of unremitting intensity.

Bourne director Paul Greengrass uses the floating camera and blurry moves to express a continuing state of urgency or action, but the focus shifts from shot to shot. The film is not fixated on a particular camera lens or focal length but the next piece of the story. One of the strengths is that the film is mostly showing you something you want (or need) to see. There are no extended closeups of Bourne’s nostrils while the next car over is exploding and sliding off a bridge. And that technique is the major difference between “storytelling” and “stunt”.

Michael Clayton is a lawyer and an enigma, even to those who work with him. He is the in-house ‘fixer’ for a law firm that has grown larger than the law. He is less a lawyer and more, as he ruefully sighs, a janitor. He’s an outsider, allowed to clean up the messes from the big boys, but resigned to the fact that he’ll never get a place at the table. When one self-righteous client snaps at him – “Are you a fixer? Or are you just not very good at it?” – Clayton’s poker face can’t conceal that he’s all too aware of his status.

Clayton’s skills at making problems disappear are put to the test when a colleague has a manic episode during a critical deposition. That attorney was spearheading a six year battle, defending a multi-national agribusiness that knowingly sold a cancer-causing pesticide. In his manic state, he strips down to his socks and streaks across a snowy parking lot before threatening to spill billions of dollars worth of dirty secrets. Clayton, already at the end of his own rope, finds himself face to face with a problem he can’t contain.

If movie stars mostly play themselves onscreen, then here is the George Clooney who never got his big break; the guy who made it to the minor leagues on charm but couldn’t hit in the majors. Michael Clayton is a man whose failures outweigh his successes – divorced, broke, middle-aged and dead-ended at the office. He’s acutely aware that he might work among gods, but he’ll never join their ranks. Clooney effortlessly slips into his character and wears him like a rumpled suit. It’s a mesmerizing and powerful performance, without a trace of vanity.

The precision engineering in the script is largely in the dialogue. The back room deals, the board room pleas, and the whispered legal wrangling all have a crisp twang of corporate reality. The people who walk these architecturally imposing hallways feel omnipotent, re-arranging right and wrong to suit their whims. Clayton’s dialogue, too, is a pitch-perfect capture of white collar desperation.

For all its precision, Michael Clayton starts awkwardly – first with a manic torrent of dialogue, echoing through the oppressively cavernous law offices. Then it spins through a number of fragments, culminating in a peculiar shot of Clayton admiring some horses in the grey dawn, as his car explodes, before whisking us back to “four days earlier.” The way-back machine and scrambled chronologies are fast becoming a cliché; but as soon as he rewinds to the beginning, first time director Tony Gilroy lands firmly on his feet.

Gilroy, ironically, is best known as the writer of all three Bourne movies. None of which are remarkably verbose, though what dialogue there is gets fired off in a staccato rhythm similar to Michael Clayton. As a director, he eschews trickery and flash. There’s a brief, early scene in Clayton’s office, where overlapped phone conversations quickly sketch out his role in the firm. The current style is to cut sequences like this as if they were shot in a blender and assembled by a team of music-video experts. Jumps cuts and flash frames would be rhythmically cross cut with phones ringing, Clayton rattling off dialogue, with flashing frames of white visually popping the audience across the cuts. Tony Gilroy and his editor avoid all that fuss, montaging Clayton’s career with simple and clean edits, confident that letting the story unfold simply will be powerful enough.

That approach pays off handsomely, keeping the tension level high while enhancing Clooney’s intense, precision work. Even the jumbled opening pays off near the end, as knowing where the pieces fall keeps your attention riveted on the characters. By the time the story reconnects to Clayton on that hillside, we’re not watching the climax of an action thriller, we’re watching a man truly hit bottom. The pulse-pounding editing suddenly stops, the orchestral music cue crescendos, and instead of the explosion we’re expection, there’s an extended moment of silence. In a riveting, climactic moment, Clooney delivers by showing nearly nothing. He’s been drowning in his own failures and frustrations; too far gone to snap, too old to cry, too cynical to be surprised, Clooney conveys it all with a slump of the shoulders and the light flickering out of his eyes.

Not that utter incomprehension could stop one from enjoying the visceral action. Paul Greengrass, the director of United 93, sets a new standard for action movies here. He’s a maestro with the hand-held camera; if there was a shot from a locked-down tripod somewhere in there, it’s well disguised. The constantly floating camera creates a world where nothing is stable, not even loyalty or identity.

Greengrass is the anti-Michael Bay, generating adrenaline with barely perceptible blurs instead of iconic commercial imagery. For example, the fight sequence in an empty Tangiers apartment is now the benchmark by which hand-to-hand combat scenes should be judged.

Bourne and his opponent trade bare-knuckled blows with constantly increasing speed and intensity. No Hollywood distractions or kung-fu wire work dilutes the combat. Its just raw, unremitting physicality, moving too rapidly to allow thought. There’s no pause for contemplating mortality, no room for wisecracks, just swift, lethal reactions. The flurry of blows is relentless and breathtaking, and the camera pushes into the action, locking the audience right into the heart of the combat. By the time the knife gets whipped out, the hands are flying faster than perception can track them. It’s an exquisitely choreographed blur that is a crystal clear shot of adrenaline.

It’s a style that might be off-putting to some, but Greengrass goes for it with total commitment and a sure hand. Would you rather watch a movie that shows you candy-colored nothing in exacting detail? Or a movie that shows you abstract, real-time blurs that hit like a ton of bricks?

“You start down this path, and where does it end?” asks one agent.

“It ends when we’ve won,” is the cold reply.

The Bourne Ultimatum is set in the modern cold war, with ultra-advanced technology being deployed against ill-defined opponents. Spies without clearly defined sides using bulldozers to fight fog banks. The film’s color palette – all muted blues and grey – hardly separates the good guys from the bad guys. This is the new paranoia, which is just like the old paranoia but with sharper graphics. GPS and RFID can track modern spies to a fraction of an inch, it seems, but the big picture just gets more muddled.

Jason Bourne, as a character, is a curious counterpart to John McClane from the Die Hard series. This is the era of the mortal super-hero and the nebulous enemies. Twenty years ago, Bourne would have been a single-minded American soldier fighting the Russians. Now he’s a free agent, no longer a patriotic American, fighting a secret government program that hovers between the corrupt and the flat-out illegal. Bourne’s character is a virtual ghost, and his enemies are just as non-corporeal.

Unlike the acerbic John McClane, Jason Bourne doesn’t have a personality. He is as grim, efficient, and grey as a snub-nosed pistol. His chase is supposedly about unlocking the answers to his past for some semblance of redemption. The film, though, is all about the chase, which is an unending quest for answers. When it’s all said and done, neither Jason Bourne nor the audience cares that much for the final answer. There’s hardly a flicker of emotion when Bourne finds out his true history; and screenwriter Tony Gilroy keeps the final revelations brief and unremarkable. Bourne shrugs off a moment of understanding, using it to escape from another no-win situation, and keeps on running.

Answers, as it turns out, aren’t nearly as much fun as the chase for them. Or, to paraphrase Springsteen: Baby, he was Bourne to run, indeed.