This is a good point. There were no allusions to 9/11. Check that-- there is one line, at the beginning of the film, where you can hear someone say, far off, ‘‘Maybe it’s another attack.’’ That is the sum total of the references to 9/11. It is clear pretty much from the very beginning that the city is being terrorized by a giant monster.
I could totally understand how watching the film could be upsetting to people who lived through the trauma of 9/11–there is one scene, in particular, with a collapsing building and people running from the dust cloud, that I imagine might remind some people of that day. But 9/11 is not the only time in history that buildings fell down. To criticize the film as if it were being deliberately provocative is ridiculous. That’s like saying that films about car accidents are callously exploiting the feelings of people who have suffered through car accidents in real life. There’s nothing wrong with saying, ‘‘You know, owing to my car accident last year, I’m going to sit this one out.’’ But to push that responsibility onto the creators of the movie is stupid.
Speaking of obscure “that guy” moments, I was curious if anyone else noticed Richie Aprile Jr. in his 0.7 second speaking role? He should fire his agent, hehe.
I saw this last night and enjoyed it quite a bit. It was pretty much exactly what I expected and after having a day to sleep on it, I am actually glad that they didn’t go through the hassle of explaining everything. They essentially stuck to the home movie conceit throughout the movie. To have tacked on some artificial newsreel exposition would have really cheapened the effect they created.
I disagree with the people who said that the video was typical for a handheld camera though. The “shakycam” was far too shaky during the non-action parts of movie and any idiot could have done a better job of framing his subjects when he wasn’t fighting for his life. I wish they’d have toned down the raw quality of it during those segments so that you were a little better able to get into the characters and so that the frantic attack sequences were more dramatic and jarring. That’s essentially my only complaint.
I also found the monster to be a little more nondescript than I had hoped. For whatever reason I felt like I’d seen that monster a hundred times before. While I suppose it’s never been done as a giant monster movie, it’s way too typical of what you see from every FPS video game these days. It looked like it could have been lifted directly from Halo or Doom. At this point I understand that it’s pretty tricky to really be original on something considering the number of times an “alien monster thing” has been done, but I just wasn’t wowed by it.
I really have to disagree with the person upthread who complained that the monster was emoting. You must have been baked out of your mind when you watched this because the monster hardly illustrated sentient qualities, let alone emotions or humanoid characteristics.
If there’s a sequel that somehow rehashed the same event or takes it further along I’ll be eager to see it. I think a composite of newsfeeds or perhaps a documentary style film would be extremely interesting. I don’t think another first-person victim viewpoint would work though.
Just saw it – Fantastic, and I had no expectations going in (I had only seen the trailer, and knew nothing else of the story).
The handicam angle was fucking brilliant. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so immersed in a film. I was on the edge of my seat the entire damn time. And I thought the characters were mostly incredibly believable.
And the creature was awesome – I dug how they didn’t show a whole lot, yet didn’t shy away from him either.
Lizzy Caplan is awesome, and I like her smartass/bitchy character until they found the vending machine in the subway, because
Not only was everyone a stupid douchebag, the camera guy was lifted straight out of a stoner movie (though “something else, also terrible” was funny). I really didn’t care if they lived or died.
Aside from that, I really like the concept. I imagine the next time some huge event happens in a city (especially a geeky one like NY or SF) there’ll be quite a few records of it, much like this. I mean, if something’s going on downtown here, someone usually has a Flickr set up within the hour (I check).
I don’t think someone filming through all this is unbelievable (maybe not in HD and many hours on a single SD card hough ;)). When the Big One hits SF, I fully expect to be out in the street with a camera as soon as I make sure my loved ones are OK. I’m sure there’s an amateur videographer or two around who would do the same thing.
I didn’t like the shakycam but I blame YouTube for that more than this movie. (Personally, I think you should need to prove you own a tripod before hey let you sign up on YT.) I could deal, though. I did find my brain scream, “Pan, left, asshole” a lot, however.
This lends itself to a sequel quite well, because chances are there’s a few other videos just like this around somewhere (hopefully filmed by people who don’t suck quite as much.)
The SoL’s* head rolling down the street may have been implausible, but I think it was a good way to convey, immediately how bad things are right fucking now.
*I saw “SoL” upthread and wondering why someone was making an MST3K reference.
Charlene Yi, the Asian girl from Superbad (and friend of my roommates’) was apparently in this, too. I assume she was one of the two Asian girls at the party whose face you never quite saw.
Also, he framed his shot okay; he needed to get those Sephora and Nokia logos in there.
I saw it Friday night, and I really enjoyed it. That said, I don’t think I’ll ever want to see it again. As interesting as I thought the story was, as intriguing as I found the creature, I don’t think I can sit through the entire ShakyCam experience again.
I went with a group of friends, one of whom is newly pregnant. She had to duck out at some point during the movie because she started getting really nauseated… and found the bathroom filled with pregnant, vomiting women. She wasn’t really surprised- the ticket kiosk had a sign up warning us before the movie that it was to be expected.
As I said, I found the creature to be intriguing. I’ve got a lot of questions and theories about it and the smaller critters.
A few weeks ago I stumbled across a site which gave a lengthy, detailed “spoiler” with all the back-story of the creature, including it’s links to Slusho, Tagruato Corporation, and suchlike (question: can it be called a “spoiler” when it is never referenced in the film itself?). I have no idea if it was official or not - it was quite likely fan-created - but it seemed pretty well thought out and weird as hell, involving symbiotic/parasitic microorganisms that, though Slusho, “invaded” the human populace. The creature was somehow related to this but I can’t remember the details.
Anyone know what I’m talking about? I think it might have been linked from Cloverfield Clues but I haven’t been able to find it again.
These elements of the story are the ones I’m really interested in, and it is both intriguing and aggravating that I have to work so hard to find them. On one level it’s simply a huge monster or unknown origin or motive destroying the city, which is fine if that’s what you want. But if you have followed any of this “viral marketing,” it becomes a story of the petrochemical industry, environmental abuse, and international marketing. But if I want those answers, I have to dig around the Internets for hours on end. I just want an explanation, dammit.
Another interesting element is that while the basic story is certainly created by the filmmakers (eg. the MySpace pages of all the main characters, the fact that Rob is going to work for Slusho in Japan), some of it could very well be fan-created and yet it all could end up being mushed together to become part of the “canon.” This may be well one of the most revolutionary films of our time, in how it becomes a truly multi-media, multi-party creative project, even beyond what the filmmakers (who just wanted to make a monster movie) may have anticipated.
Cloverfield is a hit. It cost $25 million to make, and over the weekend it made $41 million and set a record for a January release. I guess this means that J.J. Abrams can do just about anything the hell he wants now. I’ve never seen anything else he’s done (I’ve not seen Lost) but the guy has an imagination, and I want him to do more movies. Good for him!
Just came back from a showing. Yes, this is the first film in a long time that I needed to see on opening weekend.
I think it achieved its goal. I believed it (mostly) as a first-person account and record of a monster attack. My nit-pickiness came in on only a few points. (Nobody else thought to hide in the subways? The military didn’t confiscate the camera? How much life do you have on those batteries? And the monster only looked fake in its close-up.)
I thought that the juxtaposition between the glimpses of the happy day at Coney Island and the random chaos and death was excellent. Carpe diem, for tomorrow we may die and all that.
I am interested in where J.J. and company are going to go with the story now. Could they continue filling in the backstory on-line? Could they make two more films to create a trilogy, one prequel from the viewpoint of an employee of Tagruato Corporation showing the origin and/or discovery of the monster, and one from the point of view of a member of the group (military or otherwise) which develops an effective anti-monster strategy?
They’ve got a lot of potential here. I just hope they don’t piss it away…
(Oh, and the trailer for Iron Man looks much better than I expected…)
So here’s my idea:
I think the little beasties and the big beastie are the same organism. The little guys start popping off big guy once the military starts laying into him, right? I think they’re pieces of the big guy that broke off, and reform into semi-autonomous creatures. Thats why big bad can take all the massive bombs and such; he might bust in two, but he’ll just re-form!
I just got back from a repeat viewing. I picked up on a couple things that I missed the first time around (which was Friday night).
The earthquake may have been related to the tanker capsizing. Dunno what the deal there was. But the initial series of explosions was the result of the tanker being “thrown” ashore (when the camera pans over to the firey devastation during the Brooklyn Bridge crossing, you can see the tanker in amongst the buildings). Thus, we see the explosion, then a bit later see the head come flying. This implies that the creature has a pretty good arm: first he hucks the tanker, then he hucks the head (recall that the tanker was capsized at the SoL), without having to have moved very far at that point.
The splash at the end was the creature. In fact, you can see an object falling from the sky, resulting in that splash. That, to me, implies an extraterrestrial origin for the monster. Of course, that opens up lots of other possibilities… (first step in an invasion perhaps? Throw down a big beasty, see how the defenses deal with it, plan accordingly!)
The shaky-cam really didn’t bother me in the slightest. As a fan of giant-monster movies, I’d say this movie does exactly what it sets out to do: show a giant monster rampage from ground level. The result is much more engaging and visceral than, say, a Godzilla movie, where the focus is on the monster, not the people.
Perhaps my biggest “nit” would be that the monster seemed too small during the Hud Attack, relative to its size in other sequences.
There is at least one visual allusion to 9/11 - the scene where they hide in the grocery store as the ashes of the collapsed skyscraper roll down the street. I’ve seen a clip of footage taken on the day of 9/11 on TLC or The History Channel or something like that, which mirrored that shot almost exactly.
You know what’s annoying? I *expected *a splash, or something like it, in that scene… and completely missed it!
Agreed. My wife actually thinks it was a completely different, smaller (she says “elephant-sized”) creature. I disagree- I’m pretty certain it was the main monster, but that their CG skills failed them with that render. There just wasn’t anything to show the sense of scale, and the air was way too clear- it ended up looking way too small.
Of course, how it managed to sneak up on them is another question. Maybe it was already standing there when they woke up from the crash, and it was just waiting for them to realize it was there.
My theory on the smaller creatures is that they’re symbiotes- they’re used to gather food for the larger monster, food that would be way too small for the large monster to get for itself. After the attack in the tunnels, Hud commented that they seemed to be trying to drag him away- I think the smaller critters go out, gather food, and bring it back to one central area for the big one to chow down on. Their bite (which apparently makes their victim explosively hemorrhage) is used to incapacitate their prey. It’s possible that the smaller creatures (which looked vaguely insectile to me) aren’t able to process their own food, and instead subsist off of the larger creature’s blood, effectively using it as a big digestive system.
Where’d the monster come from? It’d pretty much have to be extraterrestrial in origin. There’s no reason anything that large would exist here on Earth, and no way terrestrial biology could allow something that big to move. It actually kind of bothered me that the Cloverfield creature had what looked like canines- what possible use would those be for something that large, unless it comes from some other planet where there are other creatures that big?
I’m specifically talking about the part where we get the closeup on his face at the end, as he’s towering over Hud. His brow is scrunched down in a “mad” grimace and he’s breathing heavily, all indicators that he’s “pissed off.”
Maybe it (how do you know it’s a ‘he’?) was thoughtfully chewing and you just THOUGHT it was mad? I remember the distinctive chewing sounds as one of the more memorable parts of the movie. Maybe Hud was a bit to much white meat for the creature…or maybe it found Hud delectable or something.
I’m a little late to the party, but I thought this link might be helpful: Cloverfield camera
Definitely not something you pick up at your local Best Buy.
Yeah…because one you could pick up at Best Buy would have a Steady Cam feature built into it…
I took it more as the alien/sea beast was looking thoughtful as it contemplated a light snack. It just LOOKED angry to use humans attempting to anthropomorphize it…
