Cloverfield Discussion

I don't get to see many movies with a 4 month old in the house, but I managed to escape to see Cloverfield. Stop reading immediately if you don't want spoilers. It's Blair Witch's first person camera work, applied to a small (for the genre) budget monster movie. The monster is cool. The little monsters are cool. The acting is sometimes good, sometimes awkward. The action is often great and very intense. And it will undoubtedly be the most hyped movie of 2008 until the spring blockbusters arrive. I really enjoyed the movie, but I'm posting this so you guys can have a place to talk amongst yourselves about this movie. Groundbreaking movie-making or just hype-making? I'm not sure. I'm also not sure my skull can handle watching it again- that jerky camera action gave me a headache. (Also, there was a Star Trek teaser trailer attached, and I'm almost ashamed to admit that I want it so badly it made me hurt. Please Abrams, don't screw it up)

Comments

I'm not sure

[Lord Apathy]

I saw the movie last night and I have to admit I'm not sure how I feel about it. The story was fucking incredible but I think the shaky camera was over done. It made my head hurt and confused the story at times. I think it could have been made with out it.

But I think my most concern is fuck the people. I want see the same story from the army point of view.

Hollywood hype

[esocid]

I don't know why but I just can't seem to bring myself to think that this movie is going be anything groundbreakingly good. I've been watching rottentomatoes and the last time I checked the cream of the crop had it at 80%. I'm torn, but I still probably won't see it in theaters. The trailers just show you little enough that that's the reason I'm thinking it's just getting hyped, but hey I might be wrong.

Re:Hollywood hype

[HardCase]

I saw it and I want my 80 minutes back. It was pretty much a vehicle for special effects and jerky home video. I guess the acting was OK, but the story was, well, pretty poorly written. When I say implausible, I don't mean a monster attacking NYC, I mean the "reaction" of the characters to the event. My opinion? Cloverfield isn't a low budget scifi/horror show, it's a big budget TV show. Maybe it should have been an HBO film or something.

The Star Trek trailer? Please, god, don't let Abrams screw it up...

Very good, very original

[halivar]

I was expecting a rehash of the Blair Witch Project. Somethings that made it refreshingly different:
1) The main character, for me, wasn't Rob. It was the guy holding the camera. He was a complete idiot, but I loved him.
2) I thought there was clear character progression for Rob, from complete, insensitive jerk to heroic.
3) Clear resolution on the real story, which is Rob's relationship to whats-her-face.
4) Kick-ass special effects.

One caveat about the movie: bring Dramamine. Lots of it. I had two friends with me who missed the whole second half of the movie because they couldn't look at the screen.

Re:Another movie there

[thomas.galvin]

Say a film crew gets picked up and is in that push where the army is taking on the critter. We can here some rumors where the critter come from as told by the grunts. It wouldn't even have to be a film crew. It could take the form of an after-the-fact report, kind of a "here's what we were able to piece together about the monster" thing assembled from various sources by the military. You could have film from traffic cameras, cell phones, security systems installed in stores and ATMs, those night vision things like we see from attack helicopters in Iraq, all kinds of things. That would allow them to be a bit freer in the narrative - we could actually follow the monster - and it would be an interesting comment on how much of a surveillance society we have become; "everyone in New York is dead, but we still have film of the entire thing."

Re:The keyword in that diatribe was 'hyped'...

[NtroP]

You idiots! That's called artistic license! It also helps to fuzzify poor special effects and give the "film" an "edgy" feel so supposedly beloved by trend-setting, market-leading (perhaps ironically-named) focus groups comprised of drooling morons.

The whole point of the movie is that it's the raw, unedited content of a consumer video camera that was found and is now being used as a piece of government evidence for the Cloverfield incident. I think we are supposed to feel like we have been given access to the raw content by the government (because we are a part of an investigation or an FOIA or something...) So in that sense you just get whatever happened to be on this tape (or SD card).

That being said, I don't know anyone who is that bad with a camera; even a small handicam which doesn't have the mass to help dampen small movements. I mean seriously, it's one thing to not hold it still or to zoom in and out too much, those are novice mistakes. But it is an entirely different thing to not hold the camera level while shooting or to completely cut off the head of your subject. Sure, if you are running and forgot to turn it off, fine, but no amature holds the camera at an extreme "artsy" angle while they are actively filming something. Admittedly, the odd angle often composed the image better than a straight-and-level shot would have, but someone who knows enough to do that would have a steadier hand and a better overall ability to compose scenes.

As an amateur videographer myself I've had to sift though hours and hours of tedious, useless, and horrendous raw clips from a variety of sources, including my own and I can tell you that it takes practice to be able to get usable content from spontaneous events and activity. It's almost impossible to get commercial content without a lot of planning and orchestrating, and that's assuming that you've got experienced hands on the camera(s). I was actually filming one time when the plane I was filming in crashed. The camera was on the whole time (you can hear me saying goodbye and that I was filming my death) and except for the actual impact (where the camera blanked out briefly) and the part where I was crawling out of the wreckage, my footage is more stable than Cloverfield's.

Cloverfield's videography truly made me feel like a pro was trying to act like an amateur and failing. The move would have actually been better, in my opinion, if they'd given the camera to the actual actors and made them do everything themselves while acting the actual scenes. You would have at leas gotten shakiness that made more sense with the action.

Once I was able to force myself to swallow the fact that I was watching completely raw, amateur handicam content I spent the rest of the movie trying to build my own story out of it as if I was viewing raw evidence for something I knew nothing about (which was true) and actually came away liking the movie. My wife, who gets sea-sick at the drop of a hat, even liked it (apparently there was too much violent movement to trigger more than just a headache for her). We are going again today to take our son to see it. It's painful to watch, but I appreciate the fact that someone has made a different kind of monster movie than the normal formulaic ones. I especially like the fact that no one survived. That, at least, was refreshingly realistic. Some movies need happy endings. This one was better without it.