Cloverfield - dear god that sucked (spoilers)

Cafe Society
81

Cloverfield did not suck. Cloverfield was a monster movie, not subject to the usual logical filters.

There’s an easy antidote to Abrams rabbit hole fetish - stop at surface level … monster! movie!

Just avoid the endless chain of background material and other nonsense.

It was nice to see the monster! movie! done from the little people perspective. The usual perspective is to embed the viewer with the army.

Shaky Cam is an acquired taste.

Abrams explained, at some point, that “Clover” was a baby, and was reacting badly to its environment. As for the splash/impact, that wasn’t the monster. That was a satellite, which disturbed the monster. Never mind that conventional satellites, unless they’re shielded, will likely not survive reentry. Down, logic.

And the little creatures? They were basically skin mites, on a larger scale. And exploding girl may have been the victim of parasitic reproduction - mite injects you with spawn, who then rapidly grow and leave. Through your abdominal wall.

And it’s pointless to try to explain the monster’s biology - it’s a monster. Godzilla never sucked because of biological implausibility. It also didn’t suck because of his demise in the first movie due to an “Oxygen Bomb.”

The movie was nice in that it did not have a forced happy! ending! It also didn’t drown us in music, and it didn’t explicitly clean any endings. Ambiguity, yay!

If you’re not mollified at this point, just imagine Cloverfield done by M. Night Shamalangadingdong. Now, that would suck so hard, it would have its own singularity point, gravity well and event horizon. It would emit pulsar-like jets of cinematic suckiness.

82

I just watched The Mist on DVD. Interesting, almost cinema verite style; a lot of hand-held camera work, and for most of the movie there’s no music on the soundtrack, just dialogue and ambient sounds. It occurs to me that such an approach might have worked for Cloverfield; you could have still stuck with a small group of people and their POV, but without the nauseating shakiness, and without having to keep justifying that one character just keeps filming what’s happening to them. You’d lose the “found footage” premise, but it might be a good compromise.

83

I assume you simply don’t like giant monster movies at all? That’s another complaint that is not at all unique to this movie, or this monster. There are no biologically feasible monsters in the movies, really, and that’s especially true of giant monsters. You either accept them, or you don’t, but it does seem a bit overly nitpicky to say this one doesn’t make sense because of its size.

84

Yup. Do you guys know why Godzilla was invincible? Supposedly, it’s because his flesh and muscle can be blown off/pierced/etc., but it just regenerates instantly.

85

Cal, I realize you probably weren’t the first person to name the monster Rodney, but Goddam if I don’t giggle everytime you call him that. I think I laughed out loud the first time I read it.

In fact…

I just wasted two minutes.

** Warning spoiler picture of the monster & annoying internet meme **

86

You should realize that people have said the same thing about Shyamalan’s Signs – that it’s a rare case of showing the Awful Attack from the point of view of the Little People who are under siege.

I don’t know which films these folks are seeing, or which books they’re reading. The Victim’s Point of View is an incredibly common way of telling such stories, starting with H.G Wells’ War of the Worlds

bb2k – As far as I’m aware, I AM the first to call him Rodney. At any rate, I came up with it independently (before the movie’s release, and stated on this Board), and haven’t seen or heard anyone else using it.

87

That may or may not be the case, but the name is Shyamalan. Why do otherwise intelligent-sounding posters on this board pretend that Shyamalan’s name is impossibly hard to spell or pronounce? Shyamalan.

(And even a tiny bit of matter has a gravity well.)

(Is there a thread about Shyamalan’s upcoming movie The Happening yet? Here’s hoping he’s pulled his head out of his ass. But every time I see the trailer and hear somebody intoning, “An event is happening!” I add, “An occurrence is taking place!”)

88

No I think it depends on how the movie’s done. I think we can all give a past to the movies of the 50’s and Godzilla and such, as they were done at a time when biological feasiblity wasn’t even considered…but some at least tried…The Colossal man, comes to mind; at least they tried to explain that if the guy kept growing he would die, as his internal organs would fail.

I don’t expect a creature that breathes radioactive fire to follow the laws of biology, that was already tossed out the window and I can go with it. In that universe, I can accept Godzilla being invincible, or giant flying turtles or guys that change into giant robots.

Cloverfield wasn’t meant to be in that universe. IMO.

For me, the whole premise of Cloverfield was to treat an event that we’ve all seen in hundreds of films in a different, more realistic way. I think they kinda of did that with the found narrative via video camera concept. I liked the seeing the giant monster from the eyes of the people, as opposed to that of the brave sciencist, his plucky girlfriend and the brash, but lovable general.

The city’s destroyed, people we’ve come to care about die (I think they failed on that , because I really didn’t care if they died or not), people got battered and bruised and made stupid decisions, most of which got their friends and family killed…etc. All different for this genre; where death is usually reserved for strangers and is bloodless.

In a universe that tries for realism, invinciblity should not exist. Toughness yes. I would have loved to see the monster show that it was damaged by the attackes, when we finally see it close up when HUD dies; that would have been enough for me to tie the monster into the reality the they created, where the innocent die, the army fails and monsters show the scars of battle…because everything else in the city does.

YMMV…of course.

89

:cool:

Then I shall cite you as the source if I see it anywhere else (I haven’t yet).

90

I’ve read ‘the twist’ to this film and assuming it is accurate, the movie will be a huge pile of ass.

Spoiler for ‘The Happening’: The plants and trees are emitting a toxic gas that causes people to kill themselves. It is their way of attacking us after years of abusing them. When Wahlberg is running in the one trailer clip, it is because he is trying to stay upwind from wherever trees are.. I cannot confirm that this is the twist, but wow is it painful if it is.

I like to think I’m a smarter than average guy, but I had absolutely no problem with the monster at all. I thought going to save the girl was a bit far-fetched, but the movie was fairly short already so adding that to pad it out, rather than just more time in the subways, was fine with me. I grew up with monster movies, so this was just another monster, told in Blair Witch style, which I really dug.

Aliens that are supposedly intelligent landing on a planet that is 75% water when that is their fatal weakness I don’t buy so much. And forget about being able to outrun ‘cold’ and making it safely to a library since cold cannot cross doors.

91

Well then, the answer is obvious for all of those people who are wondering if the creature is alive or not.

They changed the ending by watching it.

92

I think the weaponry thing is another case of assuming things without a good reason.

Maybe the thing is invulnerable. So what? All signs point to it being an alien; maybe that type of alien is just so tough that by our standards it’s effectively invincible. Maybe it’s a magical dragon from another dimension and its skin is totally impervious to anything other than unicorn horns. We just don’t know.

93

See, there’s the rub: in a universe that tries for realism, giant monsters can’t exist, period! Giant monster movies necessarily take place in an alternate reality. No matter how realistically the movie may have been filmed, the events which occur therein are still outright impossible, and the story remains entirely within the realm of fantasy.

Besides which, most giant monsters are allegories for the “big scare of the day” anyway. Godzilla represented (especially to the Japanese) the terror and destructive power of the atomic bomb. Even the rhedosaurus from The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms represented this same fear (but from a more subdued American perspective). Others represent a general fear of science, of genetic tampering, etc., etc. Rodney Clover McSnookums may well represent something like the current fear of “terrorism” - you can’t stop it with bombs, you don’t know why it’s there, and it’s largely indiscriminate in who it kills or what it destroys. Or something. Anyway, think of them as incarnations moreso than biological entities.

94

Shamallamadingdong.

Marge: I’ll just have a cup of coffee.
Bartender: Beer it is.
Marge: No, I said coffee.
Bartender: Beer.
Marge: Cof-fee.
Bartender: Be-er.
Marge: C-O…
Bartender: B-E…

95

Ok, I’m sorry, but I hear this as the number 1 trump card against Signs every fucking time. Do people simply not possess any imagination? Does a movie need to spell out ever detail in order for it to be successful? I’m sure fanfic writers could come up with dozens of plausible reasons why the aliens came to Earth. I can think of at least one:

The aliens in Signs were adolescents, and part of their coming of age ritual was to enter the harmful atmosphere of earth and bring back some human captives.

Fact remains that the point of the movie wasn’t to explain WHY the aliens (IF they were even aliens) came to earth, so it’s never revealed to us.

Sorry about the hijack.

96

*Cloverfield *is one of the most entertaining movies of the year.

97

Okay, after viewing the ending again, I finally saw the splash. It happens right before the camera swings around to see their faces on the ride. There is a little dot falling from the sky much more distant than the boat on the right. It’s to the left of the boat, the dot falls and then there is a faint splash.

As far as the characters not being characters someone could sympathize with, well, I don’t know. They just seemed like people to me. People with issues and problems and normal. Which put me in that whole “in the midst of things” feeling.

98

I agree. The characters weren’t *meant * to be overly relatable, IMO. That wasn’t the point. The movie was meant to be found footage, and that’s how it felt to me. The party and the Coney Island footage were about as interesting as I’d find any random stranger’s home movies (although I did, as someone mentioned upthread, appreciate them as a framing device).

That said, the party took waaaaaaaaaaay too damn long for my taste. These people are boring, get to the carnage!

99

I had very mixed feelings about Cloverfield.

The things I hated about it were mostly from the fact that I live in NYC and they really screwed with the geography of the place. It seemed that the people who wrote it had never been to the city. There was a very under-rated movie called Down with Love that played this sort of thing as a joke, having a character standing in front of one NYC landmark and then running across the street to catch a cab with a different landmark, from a completly different side of town in the background. Cloverfield was that bad with the geography of NYC. You can make up ‘reasons’ or ‘excueses’ but really, those things yanked me out of the movie.

However there were lots of good things about the film as well, like the scene where a character gets a phone call from his mom and then he has to go on and explain how his brother is dead.

100

^ Curious, because from what I’ve read, Cloverfield appeared to be pretty accurate with the geography.