Loved it. Absolutely loved it. As the first 2008 movie release I’ve seen so far, I can’t just say it’s the best movie of the year so far, cause it is by default. But it will remain near the top of my list throughout the rest of 2008, no doubt. Will everybody love this movie as much as me? Who knows. Probably not. I haven’t read ANY other reviews yet (I kinda put myself on a blackout for media exposure of the movie given the cryptic and great advertising campaign Paramount was running and the fact that I knew I was gonna see the movie no matter what).
Writing: Nothing but praise to give to the writing. As a former writer for both Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel, Drew Goddard was quickly snapped up by JJ Abrams to work on Alias when Angel was canceled. Goddard worked on the last season of Buffy, then it ended. After that he went to Angel, and it happened to be the last season of that show. Then he started work on Alias. You know what happened then? Yep, it ended up being the last season of that show. So, he moved from Alias over to Lost. And what do you know, he finally ended up on a show that didn’t end the year he started writing for it. Well, his association with Abrams finally launched into a film career with the writing of this script. Like James Cameron’s script for Titanic, Goddard’s script manages to setup characters and situations that perfectly work to get the main character to enough different places to experience the disaster from the needed perspectives. And the script sets things up with apparent ease and cleverness. It uses everything to its advantage, from the gimmick of using found camera footage and having it been recorded over a previous recording that we see little glimpses of from time to time between cuts, making for a wonderful counterpoint of our main characters. The characters are well written, and perfectly tapped into as average folks in the middle of this chaos. It’s brilliant. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at the pitch meetings for this movie. I have to imagine the pitch line was something like “Godzilla meets 9/11.” Or if they’re trying to be slightly more tactful, “Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project.” Still, given the stylistic approach, it conjures up the visual ideas of camcorder footage from Manhattan on 9/11. And amidst all this, Goddard weaves in a nice bit of a love story as the glue that keeps things moving.
Production: Matching the fantastic writing is the spot-on perfect production. I’m not normally a fan of “shaky cam” hand held footage. However, this is a situation that absolutely warrants it, and it’s very well done. While remaining believably shot by an average dude, it does a good job at capturing just enough of what’s going on to both tell the story and glimpse the awesome visual effects and production work happening around our main characters. And what a visual effects process this film must have been. It’s spectacularly visualized, all in the frame of a never-still shot. The roto-scoping and match-moving involved must have been grueling. JJ Abrams’ long-time visual effect supervisor Kevin Blank and his teams at Double Negative and Tippet Studios did a phenomenal job. Truly fantastic work. Add to that some glorious sound design and mixing and you’ve got a great experience. They have to fudge things ever so slightly in visual quality and sound quality as to what a camcorder would actually record, but it’s carefully done to not lose that feel. Also, it’s kinda cool to see Matt Reeves as the director of this, as he used to be JJ Abrams right hand person while working back in the day on Felicity, so it’s cool to see them rejoin forces.
Cast: Populated by a cast of basically unknown actors, the cast makes it all work. With pretty much the entire cast hailing from television roles, this is certainly a bigger production than they’d likely been used to, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Lizzy Caplan was the funniest part of the overlooked CBS series The Class from last season. Jessica Lucas had a small recurring role on CSI last year and did a good job. T.J. Miller is hilarious on the very funny, current ABC series Carpoolers (as a character named Marmaduke). Michael Stahl-David hails from the NBC series The Black Donnelly’s from last season (a show I didn’t particularly like, but he was good in it). While Mike Vogel has a more mixed resume of movies like Poseidon and shows like Grounded For Life. With pretty much no recognizable actors to the average viewer, this movie puts all of the budget into the production qualities, which is cool. Not only that, but not having well known actors in the roles helps lend believability to the “average person” reality of the approach (in the same way that The Blair Witch Project would have been hurt by some well known actors in the roles).
Music: The score to this movie is literally an end credit suite and nothing else. As the end titles credit it, the score suite in said credits is simply titled “Roar!” and is composed by JJ Abrams’ exclusively used composer Michael Giacchino. And in line with Giacchino’s fantastic talent, this end credit suite is huge and fantastic. Despite only writing a cue for the end credits, Giacchino swung for the fences. It’s a wonderful suite. It’s all the more impressive in an era where end credits are either covered with a lame song or an assembly of existing score cues from in the movie. Few composers get to write a genuine score suite for the end credits anymore, let alone ONLY writing one. And to get to do a 12 minute suite with an 87-piece orchestra is quite the luxury. Giacchino is one of the best new generation film composers in the game, and his Roar piece is classic monster/action scoring at its best. I’ve gotta get my hands on a copy of Roar! Hopefully it’s show up on iTunes or something. It obviously won’t get its own CD release or such (this is one of the few advantages for me when it comes to online music sales, where they can easily release something small like this that couldn’t warrant its own CD release).
