Disgustingly Adequate

Film, while a passive form of media, has a lot of potential to make people feel a certain way. However the audience feels depends on the movie. If a group of people were watching Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, then the audience is supposed to be laughing and feeling jovial. Film has this power due to both its narrative and the way its filmed. The narrative gets the audience's attention on a conscious level, and the cinematography usually hits at a subconscious level.

As solid as a model most movies are, there's room for improvement. One way to improve upon the model is by filming with a subjective camera, meaning film from somebody's point of view. The first great example of this can be seen in The Blair Witch Project. This movie was blatantly filmed as a fake documentary and meant to put you in the shoes of the "filmmakers." It can be argued as to whether or not it was effective, but manipulation of the audience was the goal.

The newest in the line of these cinema verite (flashy documentary-style filmmaking) is the horror movie Quarantine. In this film we see through the eyes of a camera man who is working with a reporter following a couple of fire fighters around for the night. All was quiet, but then the inevitable happened and they were sent out on a call. They were sent to an apartment where an old woman was sick and acting strange. She attacks one of the police officers, everybody inside the building gets locked in and character after character gets picked off.

More or less, this film is a zombie movie, and, as such, succeeds in a number of ways. The movie begins with enough character development to cause the audience to care when somebody gets killed off. This is especially true in the case of the reporter, the camera man and the two fire fighters. The movie is gross, but significantly less than others of the same genre (i.e. Diary of the Dead). So, instead of relying on gore to carry the film, it relies on the building of suspense to scare audiences. Typically, this is a good thing. Gore is easy to produce, but creating tension takes more work. And while there are some blunt clues, there never is an exact answer as to what started everything.

While the film deserves credit for those accomplishments, that wasn't enough to save the film from mediocrity. Besides the four main characters, not much connection is made between the secondary characters, so when they start dying there isn't much emotional resonance. Also, not falling back on gore to carry the film is admirable, but if the movie is going the route of suspense, then the director ought to be damned sure he can deliver. In this case, he couldn't. Many moments were meant to be scary and full of tension, but often fell flat or became laughable (the young girl "turning" is a great example of that). But the biggest mark this movie missed is in the use of the subjective camera.

Cloverfield is the perfect example of what you should do in a cinema verite film. It gives a first person view of the movie's world, but still allows you to see other things. For example, with the exception of several hectic scenes, you can clearly see what's going on in most of Cloverfield. Whether the characters are in a dark subway station or at a party at somebody's apartment, the viewer can always make out what's going on. Quarantine failed at this. On purpose, too.

Quarantine subscribes to the belief that what the audience can't see is what scares them the most. As a result, the filmmaker decided to make it so the audience couldn't see half the movie. It did add some ambiance to the film, but it took away so much more. It'd be easy for a viewer to spend most of the movie trying to figure out what they're looking at as opposed to paying attention to the events of the movie. This gets particularly frustrating during the last stretch of the film.

Also, Cloverfield used this filming technique correctly. In one scene, where the main party goes back to rescue their friend from a nearly destroyed apartment building, they find the friend pinned down by a piece of metal. The camera man in this movie sets the camera down to help lift her off of it. The camera is left behind a piece of rubble partially blocking the audience's view. So, the audience is left looking at only the friend's legs as she's being lifted off the metal. This builds tension because the audience can hear what happening, and the audience is imaging something worse than what could have been filmed. This sequence could have been easy to mess up, but the director did a good job putting together everything in the frame well.

Quarantine is a mediocre film. It has some jumps, some neat ideas and an interesting story. But all of these qualities only take the film halfway to its mark. Instead of reaching its full potential, it's left in the middle ground of average. In reality, seeing a movie with such potential end up so common is worse than the movie outright sucking.