I mentioned this upthread, but according to Hud’s MySpace profile:
I took that to mean that the rest of him was no longer available for measurement. 
Maybe he just hatched from an egg (with a hideously long incubation period)?
Yeah, I’ve seen warning signs before as well, but they were fairly generic “this movie has shaky-cam, which may trigger motion sickness in sensitive viewers.” My point was that none of those signs I previously saw actually said, “Maybe you shouldn’t see this movie.”
Agreed, there simply isn’t any reason for J.J. Abrams to come up with an origin for the monster.
I don’t really get why people want to know the origins of the monster in the first place.
It seems to me as though the whole point of the movie is that you just have absolutely no idea what’s going on, just like the characters.
Anything they come up with for the monster is just going to turn the franchise into a generic “Monster shows up, smashes” thing, and we have plenty of those.
Same reason why people learn to speak Klingon and read the Appendices in the LotR books. The mystery and novelty of it was wonderful when first exposed, but eventually that wears off and you want more. I want to be entertained beyond what the original work did. Abrams has no obligation to give us more, but I’d dig it if he did. Even if it sucked.
Right, it’s not that I have a burning need to know anything more about the monster. But now that I’ve seen the ground-level-ordinary-people-who-don’t-have-a-clue-point-of-view movie, I wouldn’t care to see a sequel that rehashes the same event from different-ground-level-ordinary- etc.
I’m hoping we get more ground-level views, but from different points in the history of Snookums.
I could see a prequel, from the point of view of a worker harvesting Slusho ingredients, not really knowing what they had disturbed (but we do, having seen the rampage).
I can see a third film, from the POV of a grunt or a bottle-washer associated with the military troop or scientists who resolve the problem.
I would also like to see more on the web filling in the back - and - side stories.
Am I the only one who got teary-eyed during this film? I’m a dude, and am not usually affected by films, but I’ll be damned if the final scene didn’t get to me both times watching it:
After both Rob and Beth had died, the final scene shows both of them on a merry-go-round, laughing and having fun, then Rob begs Beth to say one last thing before the camera runs out of tape. A smile slowly spreads across her face, then she utters these words: “I had a good day,” in the sweetest way imaginable – blissfully ignorant of the horrors soon to unfold.
The juxtaposition with the old happy footage and the new horrific footage was absolutely brilliant. Hell, I’m getting teary-eyed just thinking about it, dammit.
I believe** Cal ** had the best name for the monster
Heehee, still makes me giggle.
I’m sure you’re not the only one but I’m a chick and it didn’t move me an inch. Nothing in the course of the film made me like these people. I don’t know if it was the acting or the lack of character development, but I never really felt the “reality” of their terror or suffering, and certainly not the lame “they slept together!” sub-plot. :rolleyes: They were just boring. And I suppose the point was that these are normal, average, everyday people in an extraordinary situation, but they gotta get me to care about these average everyday people and I just didn’t. Whenever they were on-screen I wished we’d get to more monster action, already.
ETA: Just had a thought. Perhaps Cloverfield is a chick movie for dudes. It’s a sappy ‘the one that got away’ romance pretending to be a monster movie.
I did not follow the alternate reality game that hyped up the movie before the release, but here’s where the monster came from (as speculated by the game and the Cloverfield wiki based on what I’ve read):
If you notice, one of the characters was wearing a ‘Slusho’ t-shirt. Slusho is a fictional, but very popular drink with the ad phrase ‘you can’t drink just six’. The reason why Slusho is so good is that it contains an ingredient known as ‘sea nectar’ that was discovered by a Japanese corporation that was doing undersea work for other things at the time. It was this digging around that woke up the monster which did something with said tanker in the harbor before unleashing upon NYC.
Well, I finally got to see this last night (It beat watching the Superbowl. There were five of us in the theater, and they obviously had an amnateur running the projector). Some thoughts, unspoilered:
1.) They were clearly going for the Godzilla references right from the start. They had the drumbeat “THOOM!THOOM!” of the footprints right over the Bad Robiot logo before the film even started, just like they did over the titles in the original Gojira. The loud monster roar (as noted above) captures Godzilla, too.
2.) They DID do that “muddy film thing”, which made the supposedly video shots look even less like actual video. Also, I notice that they lost the timestamp in the corner eventually.
3.) So what the hell DID blow up in lower Manhattan, sending flaming debris all over when people were on the roof?
4.) Overall well done, although the shaky camera stuff was grotesquely overdone. By the way, folks, everyone sems to be acting as if this is something new, but they’ve been making films and TV shows with handheld that was supposed to look like handheld for a long time. But now the cameramen seem to have a really severe case of plasy.
5.) The “Whale Lice” were an interesting touch. As noted above, something similar showed up in Godzilla 1985. In fact, they made me think of something even earlier – the caterpillar things in Rodan. In that film the caterpillar things wer the baddies early on – killing people and being almost indestructable, and then we learn that they were only the food for the real monster. Here they didn’t serve that introductory purpose, but added a reason that people couldn’t simply hide underground.
6.) The damned things were overplayed, although some folks like that in a monster movie. The Whale Lice weren;t simply icky predators in their own right, but if they bit you you blew up in explosive hemmorhaging. It’s like a couple of pre-teen boys making up stuff their monster does to top each other. “MY monster’s got ACID for blood! So if you cut it, it MELTS you!” “Yeah? Well if MY monster bites you, it injects somethuing that makes you BLOW UP!”
7.) Yeah, it bothered me that they threw away any weapons they had (like the crowbar used to open the soda machine), even though they knew there were whale lice around.
8.) An indestructable creature that required the nuking of New York? right.
9.) I stopped reading, so I didn’t realize there was going to be some lagniappe after the credits, but I’m, a credit-reader, so I stayed. I couldn’t make out the words at the end. “Help us”, say the websites, but apparently with “It’s Still Alive” reversed under it. Now come on! – that’s pure geekery, since a.) There’s no way the movie audience could hear and interpret that and b.) it’s not at all credible that it’d be recorded that way, following the conception of the film as a handheld record of the events.
10.) It does recall what Stephen King claimed he heard about the 1960s film “X- The Man with the X-Ray Eyes” There was, he reported, an ending some people saw where, after Ray Milland’s scientist claws the eyes from his face, he cries “I can still see!”
11.) According to the closing credits, they had stills from “Them!” and “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” in the film, but I missed seeing these in the flick. They must;'ve been stuck unobtrusively in the background.
General consensus on events: We hear the news report of the tanker capsizing near the Statue of Liberty. Our heroes go up to the roof to take a look. Big asplosion. They run down to the street. Liberty’s head arrives.
Ergo: The splosion is the tanker, having been heaved inland by the critter, shortly before doing the same to Liberty.
Apologies if this is a dumb question, but why is Abrams getting all the kudos for this? He didn’t write or direct it - am I missing something? Is there a credit that says ‘from an almost original idea by JJ Abrams’?
I dont remember people saying ‘Kathleen Kennedy can do no wrong!’ when ET hit.
Enjoyed the movie but as others have said - felt very sick for a cople of hours afterwards.
MiM
No, the Writer’s Guild does not grant an “almost original idea” credit, although it would be amusing if it did. For Abrams to receive any kind of writing credit, he would have had to propose it to the WGA, and the WGA would have to approve it. The guild has a higher bar for production executives to pass in order to receive any credit.
According to the movie’s production notes (Word document, Abrams is responsible for many of the movie’s creative aspects, including the defining characteristic of making a giant-monster movie from ordinary victims’ POV.
We saw it tonight, or rather late this afternoon. Not a lot of people in the theatre, but it was a 4:40 pm showing. My husband didn’t like it all; I screamed more than once. 
I liked not being able to see anything of Snookums at first but fleeting glimpses, kind of like in the early Alien movies. It’s scarier when you don’t know the whole picture. Sure, in the tunnel, when the camera went to night vision, I knew we were going to see something, but I screamed anyway.
I liked following the same group of people for the experience. I liked the longish setup so we knew the people (I really didn’t find them all that annoying, and I thought Rob was highly do-able.) I liked the juxtapositioning of the Coney Island happy day with the nightmare that followed.
I did find it too loud at times (I stuck my fingers in my ears and kept watching) but the BOOM BOOM was unnerving.
I *do *heartily pit the moronic fuckwad that took two very small children to this movie. For heaven’s sakes, I’m 42 and was shrieking; these kids were like two and five. What the FUCK?