*** Official CLOVERFIELD Discussion Thread (1 Viewer)

[Justin_S]

His new zombie film has actually been finished for awhile now. It had to wait to get distribution.

 

[Adam Sanchez]

Me and my wife thought the movie was excellent, very intense but wonderfully done. If the info that it costs $25 million to make is really true, they did an amazing job with the effects. 25 Mil that looks like 150 Million for sure.


Glad I am not the only one thinking about the phenomenal surround sound that little camcorder seemed capable of! Ha ha.

I did not have a clue about the splash at the end till I saw this thread. We totally missed it. Wish there was a screenshot or something. Quite the interne t buzz on that whole splash!

 

[Inspector Hammer!]

I just came from seeing the film again and loved it even more the second time around, what a rip roaring ride this movie is!

I also made it a point to look for the splash this time and I did catch it, IMO the monster is from space (what a wonderful Tremors-ish debate this has sparked lol), you can clearly see an object coming down from the sky right before it crashes into the ocean.

In the words of the wise Earl Basset "I vote for outer space, no way these are local boys."

 

[Johnny Angell]

A quote from another excellent movie that never explains where the baddies come from, though the characters do wonder about. Isn't there a moment in Cloverfield where they talk about where it came from?

In the closing credits there is an acknowledgment for still photos from 3 movies, The Beast from 20,000 fathoms, Them, and I'm blanking on the third right now. Where did those stills appear in the movie?

 

[Rhett_Y]

I believe they are in the apartment at the party on the wall and one of them might be on a tv or something.... I think.

 

[Inspector Hammer!]

Yep, all from Hud..."Did you know that scientists discovered a species of fish that they thought were extinct for thousands of years? Maybe it came from a crevasse, a crevice, or from space like Superman."

Then later...

"Maybe it was the government, they made it, an experiment that went wrong."

I'm paraphrasing but there ya go, Hud was definitely the thinker of the group lol.

 

[BrianW]

Yeah, Hud was the one with the ideas. His idea of reaching Beth by climbing up the intact building and then crossing over was borderline brilliant.

How about a sequel from the handycam POV of one of the (unseen) aliens who sent the monster? (If that's indeed what happened....)
That would be different.

 

[Inspector Hammer!]

I love not knowing exactly what the creature did to hurl the statue's head that far into the city, did it whip it with it's tail or rip it off and throw it? The again Rob did say at the party when they saw the report of the overturned tanker that Liberty Island wasn't too far from where they were.

Either way that puppy went flyin'! And the sound it made when it hit and rolled was so well done that it ACTUALLY felt and sounded like an enormous heavy object crashed onto the street from a high altitude.

There's another aspect that I was thinking about while watching the film a second time, I was considering the whole situation from the perspective of the creature, was it malicious by choice or did it find it's way to NY and was unaware that it was hurting us, like it was so big that all it was trying to do was find a way out and was unintentionally causing damage.

Maybe it wasn't evil at all, just big and scared and was only doing what it was doing to defend itself from us, it was attacking what was attacking it. You know a film has done it's job when you start feeling for the creature and causes the viewer to think of things like that.

 

[Chris]

For all the nay-sayers of a sequel, I think the idea was brilliantly setup from the get go. "Cloverfield" was setup in the first 30 seconds as the fact that what we were watching was an "embargoed" film, "not to be distributed" from the Pentagon about "Cloverfield" area, noting the camcorder had been discovered in what was then "Central Park" but now "Zone xyz" (can't remember).

So, I think the logical sequel is something that is more of a parallel.. from the perspective of the soldiers.. what's going wrong; when did they know, the race to wage war.. and so on.. give me less shaky cam so I'm not puking and a military agent assigned to video it to send back that viewpoint to the feds.

 

[Chris]

Someone took time and re-synched the stuff at the end of the film.

YouTube - Cloverfield Ending Credits Message Deciphered

Just so you know what that was you heard during the credits..

 

[Zack Gibbs]

Someone asked earlier what camera was used to shoot the movie. Here's an article on the camera, the Sony CineAlta HD.

Rumor Smashed: The Real Camera Behind Cloverfield

Apparently a lot of folks have been asking, thinking they actually shot it with that camcorder in the film LOL. The movie was shot with real cameras, by trained cameramen--not "Hud", and they had lighting rigs, greenscreens, craft services, and they didn't even shoot it in New York. I guess fooling people so completely just means the filmmakers did their jobs right.

 

[todd s]

Well they could have a sequel where the 2 characters Beth & Rob survive the blast and show them trying to get the hell out of the city. They just don't grab the camera. And it can be filmed like a regular movie.

Also, with regards to the splash. I think its been hypothesized that its a fallen satellite. Since in the viral campaign showed "something" destroying a oil/science platform in the mid-Atlantic.

 

[Seth Paxton]

Okay, it's probably stated on page 3 or 4, but I'm not there yet. It seemed clear to me that JJ was intentionally saying the thing landed from space ala The Thing or Body Snatchers, grew about 2 weeks under the ocean or however long it was based on the tape date, and then popped out. Before hitting NY it might have first taken out the oil platform (viral campaign) as it swam around, ate things and grew.

That's as explained as you need IMO. I mean do we need to know WHICH planet it was? Didn't hurt for The Thing (well maybe in box office it did). And then both films (Thing and this) you don't really know the monster is dead...except for the post-creds snippet. I just hate the "WTF" reaction. Thankfully I didn't hear that at our showing.

I watched World Trade Center a few days before and talk about a powerful connection. I told Tino that my view of the film is Blair Witch meets Godzilla but INFORMED BY 9/11 and the footage/films from that. For example, the sound of the buildings getting knocked down, the dust rolling down the street, etc. It's not that you couldn't guess it would look this way, but it's hard to escape the realism of it now when you see and hear similar images.


Brilliant film for a JAN release. Effective use of taped over footage to give context, character motivation, plot hints (at the end) and tension relief even for a brief moment.

 

[Seth Paxton]

You've seen Lost, right? I think he's pretty comfortable with "coincidences" like this. The running theme might be that we are all a lot more connected than we realize because most of the time it doesn't make sense to us yet and by the time it does it's long forgotten or originally unnoticed anyway.

 

[TravisR]

For the record, Drew Goddard wrote the movie (although he started working on Lost with the third season so he's no stranger to coincidence). J.J. Abrams has mostly been working on either Mission: Impossible III or Star Trek since the first six or so episodes of Lost were shot.

 

[Dingiswayo]

I only skimmed this thread but I didn't see anyone that said this film kinda blew. So I'm saying it.

It looked cool (when the camera didn't make you sick) and it was an original concept, I'll admit, the POV filming of a tragedy. But most of the characters were completely retarded. Maybe Hud would have followed Robert, who was on a ridiculous mission in the first place, but the South Asian woman seemed intelligent enough and had no real reason to follow them, and Malena (or whatever her name was) had less than no reason to follow them. Not even a total moron like Hud would film some of the things he did and much of his humor was formulaic, the type of thing one would say in an audience when watching from an objective viewpoint (and thus seemingly appropriate and identifiable for the actual audience - but cheap).

And when they finally find the anorexic Beth whose chest is IMPALED on a hunk of rebar, they simply pull her off and she's all gravy? Nary a stagger, nothing to say of lungs filling with blood? I'd almost forgive it all of this if any comment by those supposedly watching the video had been made, any sort of contextual revelation at all, even if still cryptic in the JJ Abrams style. Hell, he could have introduced even more mystery, a la Lost, and satisfied some questions.

This just seemed like another movie made to show off my HDTV and my subwoofer with little cinematic content (original idea notwithstanding). If ever there is a sequel, that I will rent if anyone professes its virtues, it had better not be the same event from a different perspective. Besides being contrived at that point, we know the story already. It would be boring. Unless those apocalypse-filming idiots actually know what is going on.

Thems my opinions, as I stand against a rushing river of joy about this movie!

 

[Ken Chan]

Well made, entertaining movie. Not too scary. For example, you know that turning on the night vision was going to reveal something. And yes, definitely follow -- and outrun -- the rats.

I got a little woozy at the beginning, when the brother started working the camera and was swinging it around. But the rest of the movie was not too bad with the shaky-cam.

When Beth brought Travis to the party -- and he definitely reminded me of someone, but I don't remember what he looks like now -- I thought he was the guy that was going to get killed off first, based on his role. But nope.

It's a personality trait known as "intolerance of ambiguity". These idiots are also why trailers give away the entire movie (although not for this one, thankfully).

 

[Inspector Hammer!]

I particularly loved the opening party sequences, for a time I had almost forgotten that this was indeed a monster movie and got totally wrapped up in Rob's life, and just when I was saying to myself "poor Rob, I can't believe Beth brought that other dude to his party."...the explosion happened and the monster showed up.

It was almost like "oh right, a monster is supposed to show up."

 

[Johnny Angell]

I had the same reaction, I had gotten wrapped up in figuring out the various characters and the first explosion surprised me.

 

[Don Solosan]

"It's a personality trait known as "intolerance of ambiguity". These idiots are also why trailers give away the entire movie (although not for this one, thankfully)."

Ken, you're not the only poster who has suggested that people who don't appreciate the ambiguity of this movie have something wrong with them. I disagree.

Cloverfield reminds me of some of the B and C-grade drive-in movies of the 50s and 60s. They would prominently feature some titillating subject matter in their advertising (sex, violence; for the sake of this argument, let's say: a monster), but they often didn't live up to the expectations that the advertising created. The monster only shows up in the last five minutes of the movie, or is really lame compared to the poster... that kind of thing. You get that disappointed reaction when the audience's expectations do not get paid off.

It has nothing to do with people being idiots -- only that they're human. They go into this monster movie with certain expectations that the payoff will relate to the monster, but it doesn't. The ending is more about the characters. So they feel cheated.

This has been the main narrative mode of Hollywood filmmaking for a hundred years. So are people wrong to react this way when someone breaks with tradition and throws something unexpected at them? Should they spend hours discussing and analyzing it so it fits into a new paradigm and makes sense? Jeez, that's a lot of work for a monster movie!

That's my take on it anyway...