Alll of that sub-soap-opera-level acting and cheesieness that you have seen in the previews were improvised. I want to see this movie for the acting alone…don’t care about all you geeksnobs… this young cast is a new ensemble.
I know there wont be.
Yet I still terribly hope that there is even the smallest Lost tie in.
… It’s really not a Cthulhu movie? 
Then the Mind-Control Subliminals are working perfectly!
EEXXXXX-celent…!
I have a feeling you’re thinking of J.J. Abrams production company, Bad Robot.
Or did I just get Whoooooooooooooshed. Cuz I hate that!
Yessss… indeed, you’re starting to become one of US! It’s best if you don’t fight it.
You can’t tell, but I’m twisting the end of my mustache maniacally.
I stand corrected. They appear to be terrible, terrible improvisers instead.
I’m still intrigued by the idea of the movie, if only because the big mistake Godzilla-type movies usually make is focusing too much on the puny humans when what you really want to see is destruction-by-lizard, and preferably the only people visible to be running, screaming blobs at the bottom of the screen. Alien vs Predator was a prime example of this; they lured you to the theater with the promise of monster-on-monster fight action, and instead gave you 90 minutes of morons talking to each other. At least Cloverfield seems to be about normal people facing a catastrophic monster-related event, and not just a bunch of military guys and scientists discussing plans and monster theories when all you want to see is the monster.
Amen.
It is rare that I get a headache at a movie trailer, but that one had me wanting to kill the cameraman. My eyeballs hurt after watching it.
Replace 1998 Godzilla with Gamera and I am so there.
Couldn’t disagree more.
If something “swatted” the head of the SoL, it would crumble like wet tissue, not fling several miles to land in the middle of the road (how convienient) intact, thereby making the bystanders shit biscuits.
What 4th grade class got put in charge of “Special Effects”?
The whole thing looks and smells rotton to me.
How do you know it was swatted?
Heh. I bitched about this to the friends I saw Transformers with. The skin of the SoL is thin copper sheeting the thickness of a penny or so. Even if it took off from the Statue intact, it wouldn’t survive the landing.
That being said, I still want to see it. 
I want to know how all these monsters, aliens, meteors, tsunamis, and ice ages are always, somehow, attracted to Manhattan first. Do these things have some sort of built-in population-magnet?
Still… I’ll be there opening night. Early.
Well, King Kong was brought there. It wasn’t his idea. And in the ca 1940 Superman cartoon “The Arctic Giant”, it was brought to a museum to be displayed (a pretty obvious American Museum of Natural History, with its distinctive architecture, confirming that for Fleischer Studios, at least, Metropolis was New York) and then thawed out.
For The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the first 1950s “Monster Movie”, and the first one to use and establish the cliches (so they weren’t cliches when they used them), they realized that it was silly to have a monster deliberately want to come to a heavily populated area, so they came up with an ingenious excuse – the creature was born there, and was returning to spawn in the same place, like a salmon or an eel. It isn’t remotely likely, but it’s an intriguing concept, and shows that they put some thought into it.*
When they made the American Godzilla (aka GINO – Godzilla in Name Only), they pretty much consciously lifted the plot from TBf20kF rather than the original Godzilla, including this detail.
And Gorgo (which was set in London, not New York), the Beast was an angry Mom coming to rescue her kid.
But in every other case I can think of, the Monster had no good reason to come to a major population center.
*The scripters for TBf20kF also gave some thought to why the military didn’t simply vaporize the titular Beast, without making it absurdly invulnerable. It was carrying a disease, and the vector was its blood, and it was airborne. Spilling a lot of Beast Blood would have been disastrous. Again, pretty unlikely, but clever and ingenious. Another reason – besides Harryhausen’s innovative dimensional animation techniques – that I love this flick.
Tokyo is the first choice. They only go to Manhattan if all the hotels are booked in Tokyo.
Man, I love some of these criticisms. This movie is about some kind of monster rising from the deep and terrorizing NYC, and folks object concerning whether it realistically portrays the structural integrity of the Statue of Liberty?
well, yeah. You can more easily suspend disbelief if the rest of the things depicted have convincingle real details.
me, I just think the filmmakers were seduced by the poster art for Escape from New York, with that head from the Statue of Liberty in the streets of Manhattan (which doesn’t appear in that film, no matter what the poster art shows), and just HAD to depict that.
By the way, are you sure that’s the head of the Statue of Liberty? I couldn’t get a good view of it. I thought it was the torch.
“So, i come into town and try to show them I meant business. Yeah. I knock off the head of the Statue of Liberty. Or the torch, I forget which. And I tell the first guy I see, “You know, I belted the Statue of Liberty.” And he says “Yeah, well I’ll bet you couldn’t climb the Empire state Building!” I tell you, I get no respect.”
--- Rodney CloverfieldI just heard JJ Abrams on the local radio show and that’s exactly what he said. He knows the scene is ridiculous, he just thought it would look cool.
He also said there will be vague references to Lost.
I thought about this myself.
I live in a big city, Toronto, but it just wouldn’t work for this sort of movie. You’d have a cool shot of the monster knocking over the CN Tower and maybe caving in the roof of the SkyDome, but after that, there’s only ten or twelve REALLY big skyscrapers, and thirty or forty fairly large condo buildings and medium-sized business high rises. The city is very spread out, and a lot of big skyscrapers are way north of downtown, or out in Mississauga, or in Markham. If a skyscraper-sized monster was stomping around downtown Toronto you could see him from forty miles away.
Manhattan, however, compresses 1.7 million residents, and skyscrapers to accomodate two or three times that many people, into a little island. If you’ve never been there, much of it is like a series of canyons; it’s tall buildings for miles, water on every side, bridges everywhere, highways and tunnels flowing in and out of built-up areas. If you want a bigass monster to surprise people, you need places for it to spring out from, and Manhattan provides that. Even after he’s knocked down the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and ten other skyscrapers and monuments, he might still be waiting for you behind the Rockefeller Center, or the Bank of America building, or maybe he’s under the Brooklyn Bridge. Perhaps he’s behind one of Central Park’s bigger hills. It’s one of the very few cities in the world were you can have a monster fifty stories tall who can still surprise the hero by jumping out from behind a wall of buildings.