The cloverfeild monster (1-18-08) Your theories/ opinions of the doom to come

[bill]

it's me

i'm the monster in the op

[Joe3210]

I think it's Godzilla.

The Asylym(spelling?), the film producers who brought you Transmorphers, already released a movie involving a giant crocadile.

[Janus Whitefurr]

Ha ha ha ha ha.

I just came back from an evening screening of Cloverfield. I know what's going on. That is all.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

[Zina]

Everyone I know has seen this movie already. I hate you.
I'll be seeing it in a few hours, anyway. But still.
Hate.

[thegayhare]

lucky

being broke and vehical less, and since no one I know here wants to see it It's gonna be a while for me

[Distracting]

D= I didn't like it. All I got was motion sickness and disappointment, but that's probably just me. I mean, it was decent in the way it was telling the story, but you don't notice that when the camera goes all over.

[Yugo]

Camera work was at least a little less chaotic and more understandable than say, 28 Weeks Later. I actually understood what was going on. Sort of. Couple of friends got motion sickness as well during the movie. It was interesting, but it wasn't great.

[Zina]

Just got back from seeing it. I loved it, gotta be honest.

The camera work is very shaky. The staff actually came out before the movie and told us that if anyone gets motion sickness easily, the movie isn't for them and anyone that chose to stay would not get their money back, haha. A girl in the stall next to me actually puked when I went to the bathroom. Jeeze.

But other than that, awesome movie. A+++. Will watch again.

[Omega]

At this point, it's useless to make any guesses (for I have not seen the movie and thus don't really know what the 'perkele' the moster is). Therefore, if I guess right you're all, "pffff, somebody must've told you." and if I guess wrong, I'm just wrong. 

[bill]

Was it shakier than The Bourne Supremacy? Because that is still the king of ShakyCam in my book.

[Alondro]

All I wanna know is, does Eva Unit 01 show up to destroy the monster?

I think issa Angel.   

[Zina]

Was it shakier than The Bourne Supremacy? Because that is still the king of ShakyCam in my book.

I have to confess I've never seen The Bourne Supremacy, so I have no idea. It's supposed to be shot from a hand held camera one of the characters has. So it's shaky the The Blair Witch Project.

[GabrielsThoughts]

http://my.break.com/content/view.aspx?ContentID=435291

low res visuals of the monster I found

[Distracting]

Hey, I found something out. Y'know that part where the two are on the ferris wheel at the end? Look closely to the right at the ocean. Apparently there's a nifty little detail there.

[superluser]

I mean, it was decent in the way it was telling the story

For me, that's pretty much it.  If it tells a good story, I tend to like it.  Unless there's some huge unforgivable thing that they do, and since I knew that it was going to be shakycam the whole way through, it doesn't qualify.

I notice that they used stills from Them!, but I can't figure out where.  NOT A SECRET: It's not giant ants.  If you saw the preview, you know this.

The plot was pretty good, too.  The fact that there's no ending narration telling you what you just saw makes it pretty cool.  You get to the end, and you're still confused, which is a feeling that movies seldom attempt to evoke.

Unlike Blair Witch, which tried to convince you that it was real, Cloverfield knows that it is not, and is thus freer to do things like cuts, cinematic camera movements, blocking, and so on.  There's no hoping that your actors react how you expect them to; you tell them how to react, and if they don't do it right, and they don't film the Scary Witch you do another take.

I wouldn't give it an A+++, but then again, I don't really like monster films, anyway.  B+.

[Alkarii]

WARNING: spoilers ahead

Saw it Friday night, and I honestly think it's probably closer to a C.  Yeah, sure, it was cool that it was filmed in a way that's pretty close to how a real video on a camcorder would look in a situation like that, and there's the fact that in real life you can't always expect to get a good shot of something that you simply cannot work on, or that noone knew what the hell was going on or what to do.  But seriously, the spider critters should have been left out, or at least not have their bites do what they do.  I mean, come on, how the hell is venom that makes you swell up and explode minutes later cool?  That's just gore for the sake of gore (though thankfully the girl actually exploding is behind a white curtain, so it's just a sillouette and blood stains; gore just gets old and I find it stupid).  If they had to have venom and cause a violent death, just have it make them bleed to death through their pores.

Another thing I didn't really get was that when the creature, which I'm guessing is being called "Slusho" killes Hud, it reaches down with it's mouth open, the camera gets a shot of inside the mouth and tumbles, then we see Hud laying on the ground, dead but not covered in blood, saliva, or anything else.  Doesn't eat him, just bites him and he falls down, dead as a doornail.  Rob and Beth run over and pick up the camera, but where the hell did Slusho go?  Also, the bugs don't resemble the big one at all, so how are they related?

Obviously there's gonna be a sequel, because not only of how Hollywood is these days with making sequels and remakes, but because you hear "It's still alive" played in reverse after the credits.  Not to mention all the crap that needs explained about it.  All we know about it is that it's gotta be an alien, and it took it a month to grow up and tear up the place.

Still, I'd like to see a full, clear shot of the creature in it's entirety, the bugs too.  That face shot of it would have been okay if the sun wasn't behind it so we could see the face clearly.

(First time I've ever really been a critic of a movie)

[Zina]

I don't think the monster is called Slusho. I believe that's the company Rob is going to work for in Japan. They called the movie Slusho in effort to keep in under wraps so no one would know what they were really filming. It's just apart of the internet viral campaign they created.
The bug things, I believe, were parasites that just hitched a ride on the monster. Like...you know...a parasite would.
The fact that you don't ever really get a clear shot of the monster was pretty awesome, in my opinion. They probably edited the movie to look like it was filmed from a hand held camera so that the monster would stay "hidden" while it was stomping around and tearing shit up in Manhattan. You do get a pretty decent shot of it towards the end, though.
Honestly, I think people under estimate the power of your own imagination. Getting glimpses of different parts of the monster, and filling in the rest in your own head probably will result in something much cooler than anything Hollywood can show you.

[superluser]

Yes.  Spoilers.

I mean, come on, how the hell is venom that makes you swell up and explode minutes later cool?

One of the things that I haven't seen anyone else speculate on is the following:

What if she didn't explode?  What if the doctor shot her to stop the thing from being spread?  What if the infection has different stages, and she was in the contagious stage, while the others there had either been treated to prevent the infection from spreading or the infectious stage had already passed for the others, and they had infected everyone that they could have?  After all, the others weren't exploding, but still seemed to have some serious infection.  I don't think that that's what happened, but it's an interesting idea.

Another thing I didn't really get was that when the creature, which I'm guessing is being called "Slusho" killes Hud, it reaches down with it's mouth open, the camera gets a shot of inside the mouth and tumbles, then we see Hud laying on the ground, dead but not covered in blood, saliva, or anything else.

Never spilled anything when you ate?

The fact that you don't ever really get a clear shot of the monster was pretty awesome, in my opinion.

Agree.

Really, really strong agreement, there.  I'm writing a full review, and I'll say more about it later.

[Janus Whitefurr]

What if she didn't explode?  What if the doctor shot her to stop the thing from being spread?  What if the infection has different stages, and she was in the contagious stage, while the others there had either been treated to prevent the infection from spreading or the infectious stage had already passed for the others, and they had infected everyone that they could have?  After all, the others weren't exploding, but still seemed to have some serious infection.  I don't think that that's what happened, but it's an interesting idea.

My initial impression - it's been a few nights since I saw it so the recollection is hazy - was not that she exploded, but that the contagion/venom/whatever it was actually mutated her and killed one of the scientists. Perhaps it was just the odd casting of the shadows on the white tent. But it certainly seemed reasonable seeing as they all RAN LIKE HELL right afterwards. My sister and wikipedia seem to both bear out the "she exploded" rationale though. But hypotheticals are fun in movies.

And I cringed when it ate Hud. I wanted him to live, he was awesome. I'm guessing while it just chomped away at what it got of him, the camera got in its mouth while what we saw of Hud - his arm, upper shoulders, head - fell to the ground. We never saw below that, so he could have simply just been bitten in half.

[superluser]

We never saw below that, so he could have simply just been bitten in half.

Yeah, that's what I was suggesting.

Finally, my review.

This is very tl;dr.

I really enjoyed Cloverfield.  The shakycam thing didn't bother me, though I understand that quite a few people had their aesthetic sensibilities offended, while others had their gastronomic sensibilities offended.

The basic conceit of most monster films is that you're following the military as they try to destroy the monster.  You see the generals giving the orders to deploy tanks and kill the beast, and you have the love interest between Dr. Clayton Forrester and some woman or Kenny looking for his turtle.  At some point, they meet up with the military, and the rest of the story becomes a procedural, told from their perspective with the lead characters doing something critically unimportant so that they don't get in the way.

As David Edelstein points out, we've seen that film.  Again and again and again.

This is not that story.

This is the story that we've all experienced personally.  We've all gone through situations like these--not quite monsters destroying New York, but the blackout that takes your radio with it or the cop car that races past you, followed by a fleet of black Suburbans, or sitting in a parking garage while you wait hours for the tow truck to arrive.  The things that make you say, ``Something just happened here.  Something major.  And I have no clue what it is.''

This is why I believe that we all can connect to the characters.

For me, I think that the concept of never knowing what happened is much more satisfting than the omniscience that we usually get from films.  It's much more claustrophobic, but it liberates you at the same time.  Now you can say poof, it existed for 85 mintues, and now poof, it's gone again.  In those 85 minutes, it could have been anything--everything.  Once you start explaining it, the options for what it could be go down.

I was pleased that they didn't go overboard with particular cliches, like looting, and quite a few of the plot elements seemed pretty novel, like having two monsters that don't seem to be related, and having the smaller monster show up later.  Building hopping probably isn't new, but it's not seen often.

The monster was pretty original, as well.  I don't think I've ever seen something with arms that long before, which makes for a truly frightening visage.  Instead of Godzilla, who was pretty much frightening for fleshy pink things but pretty sluggish and not much more dangerous than any ten story object, the Cloverfield monster effectively has two cranes, complete with wrecking balls, attached to its torso.  Talk about an urban terror.

The CG was really awesome, and I didn't even realize it until after people started talking about it.  It's like it didn't really click that that was CG until I thought about it.  It's not that I'm dumb, just that the film really places you in the moment, and while CG is usually pretty obvious and takes me out of the film, this didn't do that at all.

The quality of the CG is probably due in part to the fact that there's so little of it.

Or, rather, that there's probably two minutes of high quality CG required.  You see very little of the monsters, and there are only a couple of scenes where you get a good look at them (and even those are poorly framed, since you've got either an ant's eye view or an eye-in-the-sky view).

On the other hand, practically every scene in the streets would have required CG to accurately portray the wrecked and crumbling buildings.  This, however, was probably much easier to render.  It would have been a bitch to composite in shakycam, though.

I noticed that one complaint that I keep hearing is that that was one long lasting battery.  The whole affair lasted roughly 7 hours (approximately the length of a L-DV tape), so I could see there having been a battery in the pack, and having Hud change it between one of the cuts.  Throughout the film, you can also see some DV artefacts, which is pretty cool, mainly the brown spot thing.

I wasn't feeling the characters or their personal drama, but I won't go as far as to say that they were bad.  It's not Casablanca, it's a monster film, and there was enough drama/character-driven plot that I didn't feel like I was watching Pumaman.

The plot was just about right.  In postapocalyptic films, less really is more.  If you get to a passage that blows your mind in a book, you can go back and reread it.  With a film, you have to hover over the rewind and pause buttons.  Think of the most effective postapocalyptic films you've seen.  Typically an event happens, there's some MacGuffun off in the distance driving the characters to do things or be places necessary for the plot, but between those things, the characters really just mess around.  Heck, compare The Omega Man and I Am Legend.

There are a couple of scenes in the film that really stand out as poignant.  There is a scene, for example, of two white horses carrying an empty carriage through the streets.  It didn't strike me with the fast-paced trailer, but in the film, it's actually a really powerful image.

In the end, I found the film satisfying, and that includes the ending.  The camera gets dropped at just the right point, and the end comes and it makes sense.

The sense that I got from the trailers was that Central Park was no more, and the whole area had been overgrown with vegetation like clover, hence Cloverfield.  I've since found out that the name comes from a freeway exit in California, but I still like the idea, so I won't be tossing it anytime soon.

As the credits began to roll, I swear that I heard disappointed people, which is just mind boggling to me.  I think I'd have to rate Alien higher than Cloverfield, but Cloverfield is still a really solid film.

Random observations:

Somebody suggested multiple large monsters, and that actually makes a lot of sense (especially with it destroying the Chrysler Building and then the Statue of Liberty and then the Brooklyn Bridge, all within a few minutes).

It's almost as if there were references to Ghostbusters throughout the whole thing.  I almost felt like when they were going up the building, we would hear someone say ``Alright, when we get to twenty, tell me, I'm gonna throw up.''

I want to hear Kenneth Turan's review, because I find his bloviating entertaining, and I think we'd really disagree on this one.

I would under no circumstances want to see an explainer tacked on as a sequel, like they did with the Matrix.  Any sequels should keep the viewer confused.  I would, however, enjoy a program-length featurette in the style of The History Channel narrated by Jack Perkins or similar.

It has been suggested that there might be a sequel (or rather, parallel story) told from the point of view of another set of people.  That would be cool, though there might be the temptation to do this several times and wind up suffering from Lost-itis.

Just in case you didn't know, the Staue of Liberty head rolling through the street was a reference to the poster for Escape from New York.  Apparently, Abrams was disappointed (as am I) that a decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty did not appear in the film, and started to think that it would be a cool concept for a film.  One wag suggested that Snake Plissken will be in the sequel.  Here's hoping he's right.

Thinking about this, it's pretty obvious as to why this footage would have been so important to historians.  They were there from the beginning to the end, from one end of Manhattan to the other (maybe--I'm not familiar with NYC geography), they saw both the main creature and the zerglings, both up close and far away, and there are several internal cues for time and place that would allow this footage to be synced up very precisely with other footage. And whatever that was at Coney Island that I missed.

It would be immensely cool to see a map of Manhattan with where everything took place.

[Paladin Sheppard]

Just saw this gotta say its a bloody good film.



Edit:

And I thought I'd add next to this thing Godzilla is a pussy

[Rakala]

It's a giant lizard-praying mantis thing which is a failed experiment by the government.
That or it's just a big angry robot.

[bill]

i thought we had already established that i was the cloverfield monster

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

No, you asserted it, which is not the same thing at all.

[Rakala]

I honestly don't think there should be a sequel. I think the movie should stay where it is. Although my friend wouldn't let me stay after the credits, he always rushes me out of the theater. Also on the note of the little critters not looking like the big one, actually they had the same general build. The difference was the big one had more muscle and teeth. I mean how much do tadpoles look like frogs? Because this creature was so big and the venom was so nasty for the little ones, I think the creature was artificial life. Think about it, the military seemed to know how to treat the bite victims in the tent... area.... thing.

[thegayhare]

Okay I have now seen the movie and I'll say It was a great flick.

just recently I stumbled on a review by whill wheaton and while dubbing around I found a statement from one of the people who had worked on the movie.  i was a guy who was in charge of planning out how the creature moved and why it acted like it did.

He explained that the creature was a adolescent, lost, awayfrom it's parents and suffering from separation anxiety.  It was scared and lashing out at the frightening new world it found itself in. 

also the director has talked about an interesting concept for any sequels.  He basicly said that this one wasn't the only movie made the night of the cloverfeild incident.  It would be impossible in a time when everything seems to have a camera in it.  So future movies about the cloverfield incident might fallow anouther camera man.  He mentions one scene in particular.  on the bridge HUD notices some one else with a camera filming something off the side of the briges, he turns to see what it was and when he turns back the man with the camera is now filming him.  He said that could be an interesting scene where two story interceted

[Alondro]

And we need to have a sequel with the Simpsons aliens looking down from their spaceship.

"Well Krang, you steered right into that satellite and knocked it into the ocean, awakening the giant monster and causing it to go on a rampage which is destroying one of the Earthlings' primary urban conglomerates!  I hope you're happy!"

"Indeed I am, Kodos!  Indeed I am!"

"Ok!  Just checking!"

*alien laughter*  Haa-haa-haaa!  Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!



"Indeed!  And soon