1-18-08

[Cthulhu Bob]

...

* POSSIBLE SPOILERS *

Alright, finally saw this thing in the theater. Unfortunately my friends who worked on the movie had their private showing on the same night as the Rifftrax Live show. So i couldn't make it to that obviously, and had to double-time it to the theater this weekend before they spoiled it for me! I did get a poster and a cool crew T-Shirt with the monster on it though, so that was cool of 'em.

Anyway, the whole thing felt a little long to me. Could have been a really cool Outer Limits episode or something. But it really felt like they took a single concept and stretched it to the breaking point. Although it was really only about an hour and a half, so maybe it's just me.

Otherwise, it was a pretty fun film. I had thought way early on that this was going to be something like a compilation of many people's video tapes from that night. But i suppose that sticking with one group of people helps develop characters... even if constantly holding the camera gets a little ridiculous at times.

By the way, did the size of the monster in the scene towards the very end of the movie feel a little out of scale to anyone else?

-Rude

Actually the running time was only 75 minutes so it was pretty darn short for a theatrical release and that makes it only 15-20 minutes longer than an Outer Limits episode (the 80-90s series that is).
And it was hard to tell scale with it against a gray cloudy sky. Though I would think Hud would have had much more grievous bodily injury when he got chomped by something that size.

[Plastic Self-Cleaning Duck]

Actually the running time was only 75 minutes.....

What?!?!?!?  That's only two minutes longer than MST3K: The Movie!   You'd think the studio had no faith in it... 

[Cthulhu Bob]

Actually the running time was only 75 minutes.....

What?!?!?!?  That's only two minutes longer than MST3K: The Movie!   You'd think the studio had no faith in it... 

Wellllll they did release it in January. Not exactly prime movie viewing time  .

[sarcasm_made_Easy]

im SURE the studio had no faith that the vivsuals would have worked in a longer set up

[the long undertow]

Cloverfield is this generation's Alien.

I think Alien is still this generation's Alien, actually.  Cloverfield wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but it's not going to be remembered like Alien is.  Once the people who think every movie is the greatest movie they've ever seen calm down, I think everyone will agree that a mid-70% RT score is pretty accurate if not a little generous.  Of my friends, the ones who were excited to see it were let down and the people who didn't think it would be all that great (including one guy who had only seen the preview once and didn't know anything else about it) didn't think it was as bad as they were expecting.
And what was with the internet hype stuff?  I don't see how any of that fits into the movie in a way that makes sense.

[MarkAndrew]

I saw it at the Cinerama in Seattle last night.  My thoughts:
  -The Shaky Cam was overdone, it was worse than Blair Witch.  Also, according my my tech-head GF, any handcam with nightvision tech would have stabilzation to prevent just this kind of nasea-inducing movement
  -The plot wasn't bad, I'd have enjoyed it more if the whole thing had been filmed via SteadyCam
  -However, I didn't care about most of the characters, there wasn't enough attempt to build sympathetic characters.  Most of the characters were shallow idiots or worse
  -The characters made bad decisons, I can't for the life of me imagine who would be selfish enough to allow his friends to tag along on an EXTREMELY risky rescue attempt.  For the most part, the group accomplished nothing that couldn't have been done as well by the main male lead acting along.  Basically, he got his friends killed along with himself
  -The monster and his parasites were pretty cool but...but what the HECK was it made of if HE bombs aren't splattering it.  I mean you can kill a Rhino or Elephant with an AK-47.
  -Thank God none of these characters survived to breed.  My thanks to them and the Darwin awards for taking themselves out of the gene pool 
  -

[GregMcduck]

A review from another forum, posting it here because he's totally right:

Saw it last night. I'm chiming in to say that the movie was awesome, and this is a movie that could only have been made this year. I remember watching the extras on a DVD of Akira once, and some of the commentary went to the effect that there is a difference in the Japanese and American cultural ideas of devestation. In so many Japanese monster movies or anime, an entire city is taken out with a certain shocking ease, and that just doesn't seem to happen to any extent in American art (with perhaps the exception that's coming to mind being Independence Day. More on that in a second). But even still, it's the unrelenting tragedy of the situation which is absent from American cinema (in the end of Independence Day, Bill ¨President on Vicodin¨Pullman defeats the aliens.)
The person running the commentary suggested that it was very realistically because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Americans are aware of what happened, but on the whole will only be able to view it as an act of war, whether good or evil. He suggested that conversely, for the Japanese this was an all-too-tragic reality, and so a situation like in Akira (where most of a city had already been wiped out in a single destructive act) played on Jung's collective unconscious.
Then 9-11 happened, and whether or not you really believed it changed the fundamentals of our national politics, it certainly changed what and how we argue, as well as what we know to be truly real. Then we had Hurricane Katrina, where we saw an entire city layed low and the president most certainly did not swoop in to save the day piloting his F-16.Our knowledge of the disteleological surds in this world has grown phenomenally.
And so only after these events, in a day of personal documentation and universal communication (people pulling out their phones when the Statue of Liberty´s head was in the street was a perfect moment), was this movie possible. If this played on any emotions in me (besides unyielding "HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT¨) it dredged up watching Hurricane Katrina and the devestation in New Orleans play out on the news (Exactly one black civilian in the entire movie didn't instantly start looting stores in the middle of a crisis). As much as Godzilla is a direct reaction to the nuclear bomb, I feel that Clovenfield is a reaction to the last ten years.

[bratpop]

Huh. So it's okay to exploit national tragedies for a dirt cheap monster movie? And the tragedies actually help make the movie deep and turn it automatically into a socio-political commentary? I mean theoretically you could have a crappy monster movie in the can unable to sell it and just wait around for the next national tragedy to magically turn it into Sundance material, without ever having to do anything but rip off Godzilla. Otherwise a Godzilla ripoff would never work in America. What's funny to me is how transparent this ploy is to everyone who reviews it, yet they still act like this was a genius move on the producers' part and not just a transparent ploy. That's crazy. When you find out Oz is just a guy behind a curtain, you're supposed to beat him to death, not say "good one!" and worship him anyway. The emperor has no clothes, people. And it's gross.

That's just a thought, anyway.

[GregMcduck]

Shouldn't you be pissed at Godzilla for the exact same reason your pissed at Cloverfield right now?

[bratpop]

Relax, bro. Don't tase me. I'm not pissed at anything. I just find it interesting is all. D-Wars totally bombed and yet Cloverfield is brilliant. Though if it could only be made this year... does that mean it will only be good this year? When's the expiration date for timely movies?

[GregMcduck]

The only similarity between D-Wars and Cloverfield is "giant monster attacks." The actual craftsmanship of the film, quality of acting, the suspense level, etc. are completely different.

As for "expiration dates," you can still enjoy and appreciate a film even when you are no longer in that time frame. People still enjoy the original Gojira/Godzilla, even though it's a product of it's time.

[sarcasm_made_Easy]

i dont understand why everyone is so mad a the shaky cam.  I didnt care for it either but it only made sense from the object of the movie. 

[Junkyard]

Only problem I had with shakycam was the fact that you couldn't quite immerse youself into the film when the pov was constantly being put down/picked up/ shaken violently.

[Rude]

...

A review from another forum, posting it here because he's totally right:

I think the whole idea is based on a false assumption. Basically he's building his entire review on the idea that there isn't, or hasn't been, the same extent of devastation in American monster movies as there are in Japanese films. Then he uses that idea to springboard into a much larger theory that recent American tragedies have somehow prepared us for such a movie.

It's an interesting idea that i've heard thrown around quite a bit, but i just don't buy it. King Kong was wreaking havoc in downtown New York City many, many years ago. American film monsters have almost always represented an unbridled destruction that we cannot contain. And using the monster from Cloverfield as an example of a new paradigm is baseless since it was actually contained by the military on the island of Manhattan. Not exactly a good example of America's newfound national vulnerability.

American films simply don't have the Kaiju tradition that Japan has. But our monsters cause just as much damage in the films they do appear in. And the "unrelenting tragedy" of these situations is definitely not absent in American films. In fact, a case could be made for exactly the opposite... at least when it comes to early low budget Kaiju movies.

Writers draw inspiration from many sources. And i'm sure that somehow the events of 9/11 figured into Cloverfield in a major way, maybe as much as Japan's worries over the Atom bomb figured into Godzilla. But this is nothing new, especially in American monster films. And it certainly doesn't mean that Cloverfield could only have ever been made this year. Not at all.

-Rude

[Plastic Self-Cleaning Duck]

Everyone keeps talking about this film in relation to 9-11....that the attacks gave us an emotional touchstone that makes us understand what it's like for the characters.

Just reminds me how people at the time of 9-11 were saying that because of this people would never find catastrophy films - especially set in NYC - entertaining.  In fact, that the studios should be warned that they should never make movies like this again....

As for the "shaky cam"....well, they always need something to keep you from focusing too clearly on the CGI and see all the faults.  It's usually a blinding rainstorm but that would be expensive.