I’m thinking that if a bomb falls directly on your monster’s exterior and explodes with considerable force, the heat, pressure, and shrapnel will excavate a fair portion of its epidermis of fracture its chitin. The hell with any air-filled or water-filled bladders, one direct impact bomb ought to shred and remove a lot of organic material and leave a big gaping hole where part of a monster used to be, destroying its structural integrity, causing trauma, and letting essential monster internal organs and bodily fluids leak out.
Hit the monster with a lot of these (along with various other bits of ordnance, as the film shows, and eventually your monster is going to become dysfunctional,. Except Rodney didn’t.
My other question was how was the thing able to move? I mean gravity counts for something right? 100,000 tons in water is a lot different than 100, 000 tons on land and the thing was able to move very quickly.
I hate being a nit-picker and I swear I usually don’t do this, but the movie bugged me in a really weird way.
I enjoyed the movie and feel I have no reason to defend that position. I don’t understand all the nitpicking about the monster and parasites. The movie was made from the perspective of some dudes. Of course there will be no explaination. If you want fake scifi explainations watch the classic Japanese monster movies. They show you what the scientists and generals are thinking. Cloverfield does not. In fact I hate the baby monster talk from Abrams. From watching some of the DVD extras it seemed that he was just trying to provide a base for the FX coordinator to work from when he designed the monster, not actual plot points. The fact that the monster was a confused juvenile is not in the movie, therefore it does not exist.
I don’t think anyone’s asking you to defend your position. We all have the right to watch a movie and decide whether or not it works for us and to discuss why it did or didn’t.
This isn’t an attack against anyone who liked the film.
The OP had a problem with the film, some of us had problems with it for different reasons; none of which should change whether or you enjoyed it or not.
It didn’t work for me on lots of levels, but my main issue was the biology. Like some of the others, I did read some of the virtual campaign stuff and that may have put the movie on a higher level for me than the average person; I don’t know.
I do know I was disappointed in it.
YMMV, of course.
I saw a little of the viral stuff and thought it was more boring than those campaigns usually are. Which is pretty boring. I didn’t bother with it. For full disclosure, I saw the movie on a wide screen TV. The shakycam didn’t bother me. If I saw it in the theater maybe it would have been different.
Wow, I’ll bet you’d write the neatest monster movie!
-Joe
I was going to also say that if I wanted to nitpick it would be about the imposibility of getting a heavy armor force into Manhatten in a couple of hours.
I have to agree with Loach, though, on one issue; If it’s not in the movie, then it did not happen. Even if J.J. Abrams says otherwise, the monster didn’t die in the movie; unless they make a sequel in which it’s mentioned or shown that it died, it didn’t die, insofar as the alternate universe of “Cloverfield” goes.
Of course, in addition to not dying after the movie ended, it also did not survive; it’s Schroedinger’s Monster if and until another movie continues the story and answers the question.
New from Bad Robot Productions: *Schroedinger’s Monster * starring Nicole Kidman as Dr Kitty Schroedinger.
Is all this talk…
…bunk then? That’s disappointing. It sort of fell in place with the way I suspend my own disbelief for giant-monster movies.
Eh, oh well. It’s an implausible movie in an implausible genre with a long line of implausible predecessors… I still thought it was fun.
But we could have some really cool thirty second monster movies!
Scientist Guy: Godzirra is attacking! Whatever will we do?
General: I had a plane drop a bomb on it before he got two blocks into the city. It’s been dead for an hour now.
Wasn’t that exciting? Can I have $9 from all readers of this thread? Thanks.
-Joe
Damned if I know. But look at the infamous footage of them blowing up the Whale on the beach (referred to by Dave Barry, and at several places on YouTube). Add explosive to heavily blubbered undersea creature and the result is a rain of heavy chunks of blubber.
Here’s one:
Didn’t they load their charges inside the whale?
Experiment:
Light a firecracker. Hold it on top of your flat hand. Swear profusely after it goes off.
Light a second one. Hold it in your closed fist. Have a friend dial 911… you won’t have enough fingers.
Anyway, it’s probably fanwankery, but that’s how I suspend my disbelief when Godzilla (or Rodney) doesn’t go down in the first round… It’s not so much a problem of payload size as one of penetration.
Just going back to this for a second. I had never heard of this splash thing before this thread. I just went back and looked. I have no idea how I missed it. It isn’t even very subtle. It is there. To the left of the white boat. You see an object falling from the sky and then an obvious splash in the water.
I think they put it between the whale and the beach, but I don’t know.
Don’t try your experiment with an M-80
I hate to quote myself, but I keep seeing the nitpick that bombs should have hurt the big ol’ monster.
To reiterate, how unbelievably strong would his flesh, bones, and muscles have to be just to support a 500 foot tall monster that can both run and jump without hurting itself? By all rights, it should collapse on itself!
Sorry – I know the monster would have to be almost unbelievably tough (and, to their credit, Rodney isn’t just a really big ant or something – he’s designed like something that’s big and heavy, although I still can’t buy the cube-square law as applying to him.
Nevertheless, tough isn’t invulnerable. Even if he’s got Great Big Bones in his Great Big Legs, yjat relatively flexible tissue in those pumping things in his head and his eyes are gonna get shredded by repeated hits. The blast effects from all those explosions and flames are gonna toast his mouth and airways.
Godzilla I don’t take seriously, but there are limits to my suspension of disbelief. A monster subjected to modern weapons of war is going to get shredded,
And I feel the same wayy about vampires, too. Bullet holes in the vampire that don’t stop him? Phhht! What happens when you hit a vampire with a flechette gun? You’re gonna get little piles of bloddy vampire bits.
Oh, yeah – M-80s. And REAL high explosives are orders of magnitude more effective:
Cloverfield was named because the tape was found in a field of clover in Central Park.
The DVD “special effects” feature shows Odette with the molded breastplate on. The rebar is poking out from underneath her clavicle area.