Fields of Clove(r)
- Why does everyone's cell phone work?As we know from 9/11 (not to mention the Minneapolis bridge collapse), when there are major disasters, it's pretty much impossible to call anybody. These people only took about ten minutes to get their cell phones working. And there wasn't even any cell phone product placement that I could tell, so it obviously wasn't "the network."
- Are the only people affected by a giant freaking lizard thing starting things on fire and blowing stuff up twenty-something year old J. Crew models? I mean, besides the obviously minority people who stole televisions from electronic stores and one crazy guy who was bleeding and babbling something to the handheld camera.
- Speaking of the handheld camera, I can live with shaky camerawork when you're running around being chased by a monster, but you can't even hold the camera sort of steady when you're at a surprise party? As a random person said out loud at our movie theater, "Wow, they should have gotten someone who could hold the camera steady." Well said, random person.
- If this is really a video that was just found somewhere in Central Park, why is the video of what happened the month before so freaking perfectly spliced between segments of destruction, etc.?
- Even more inexplicible, HOW DO YOU SURVIVE A HELICOPTOR CRASH?!?!?!?
- How, exactly, was the army able to set up what looked to be a totally functional hospital center in the middle of a department store, complete with laptop computers, lots of people receiving medical attention, and totally orderly business attending to the devastation outside? We all know in real life that crisis management, while usually very well-meaning, is usually much more chaotic and disorderly.
- Mostly, I was angry that the filmmakers were totally willing to simply re-make scenes of what actually happened on 9/11 but with a monster instead. Come on, paper falling from the sky? Smoke billowing through the streets? At least Ghostbusters had a man made of marshmallows. Last time I checked, that didn't happen in real life.
Okay, the list of items above is totally unfair of me. But, like I said, I removed these from my analysis! Now that I removed them, I can objectively talk about the things that truly worked and didn't work:
- The action, when it happened, was generally pretty well done.
- The exterior shots of Manhattan pretty much looked like the real Manhattan.
Turns out, as much as I wanted to analyze this 
movie without thinking about the plot holes too much, I found it impossible to separate the plot holes from my enjoyment of the movie. Compared to other movies like The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield did not even come close to following its own internally constructed logic. In the world of Cloverfield, the death of your brother on a collapsing bridge is secondary to for some reason running to save some girl that you have had a little bit of history with in a part of town inhabited by a giant monster. At least Blair Witch made total sense in the context of the film. Cloverfield had too many elements that were inexplicible within the rules set up by itself to truly take off the ground. Even a high school English student who is trying to be clever by writing their composition backwards (as pictured above) should be able to figure that out.
GRADE: Bored Tiger (** out of 5)
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Sunday, January 27, 2008.
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1) Biggest complaint: the whole plot was "Save the Princess." GRRRR. Why can't it just be them trying to get out of there? That was obviously enough of an obstacle...I actually really liked the characters' back story presented at the party, but it would have been much more enjoyable, sensible, and experimental if it was just straight up "none of that matters anymore, let's just try to get out of NYC."
2) Nokia was EVERYWHERE: everyone's phone at the party, electronics store, Subway ads = total product placement.
3) I echo the sentiments about the month-old footage. The only time it would have made sense would have been at the beginning, end, and when they rewind the tape to watch what they captured on video, cuz then they might have let it play too long or fast-forwarded back too much to start recording again, leaving a space of old footage to show. And I'd maybe give them one more time when Hud accidentally pressed Play instead of Record since it wasn't his camera so he didn't totally know how to use it...but now I'm just getting nitpicky...
Overall, at the end of the movie I said, "Ho Hum."
I'm glad I missed the product placement somehow, although it is probably now seeped deeply into my subconscious, saying "Hey Qualler, if/when a monster attacks Minneapolis, make sure to use Nokia cell phones -- they might run out of batteries at some point but they mostly work, even in underground transit."
And I agree, too -- I felt like they had a great opportunity to truly be experimental AND box-office happy, especially with the premise and the set-up for the disaster, but it was wasted somewhat by a fairly conventional set of actions.
don't forget the superb stereo sound the in-camera mic picked up. and the extreme 10 hour battery.
Chris: if they just stopped caring and tried to escape, would lugging around a camera be worthwhile?
and yeah, i agree, holding a camera level and not at 30 degree angle all the time isn't impossible.
with that said, i still enjoyed the movie enough to be able to recommend it. it was one hell of an edge of my seat thrill-ride.
Interesting question Sean, but I actually think simply trying to escape NYC during an attack would merit videotaping (we of course are talking about people that are idiots) more so than trying to escape and then deciding to go back into the heart of NYC where the attack is happening to save your best friend's college crush-turned-one night stand. Which concept is more dangerous and more likely to make you think, "I should put the camera down."
Obviously part of what comes to mind in Cloverfield is the new breed of the YouTube generation that wants to capture everything on camera...as people selfishly and idiotically did during 9/11 and the Mpls bridge collapse, etc. (I'm gonna see what I can get on camera!) These people that videotaped the wreckage didn't have their loved ones stuck in the middle of it all though. These were people looking at tragedy as voyeurs...Rob and Hud weren't voyeurs, they were in it.
So it's not going to be 100% believable either way, because the characters are still self-important half-beards that need a douche chill either way, but I think if they were just continually flirting with disaster rather than willingly entering disaster, they would have been more likely to keep the camera on. And it would have made for a less conventional movie.
This actually reminds me of a TV movie that I remember watching when I was 10 or 11 that, now that I think about it, takes the idea of Cloverfield and makes it all the better and more creative.
The whole movie was in the format of a special report on the news about an asteroid that appeared to be headed toward Earth. As the report went on, it became known that the asteroid was really sent from an alien, and astronauts were able to start communicating with the aliens. All the "action" happened as the news was reported. I can't remember all the details, but I remember the end -- the threat was eradicated, and everyone was happy, until the radar came up again and about 50 meteors suddenly came on the radar again and headed straight toward Earth. The end basically just showed the newscasters freaking out and the tape going to black.
Man, the early to mid-90s were the heyday for experimental television (this movie, which I can't remember the title, dammit!; "Twin Peaks"; "Seinfeld" to some extent). How is it that a TV movie in the mid-90s was able to take more chances than Cloverfield?
What I don't understand is A) when do we learn that Lily dies in a helicopter crash too? They mention it at the end, but she had been taken in the first helicopter and we don't see that one get struck. and B) Why does they helicopter travel parallel to the monster and its path of destruction? Why doesn't it just fly out and away from the monster? And why doesn't the pilot react to the monster lunging at them?
looks like you guys should have seen 27 Dresses instead...
also, i really like the student who wrote his paper backwards, and the teacher's comment, haha.
P.S. if you'd like to know more about 27 Dresses, tune in Wednesday for a blogulator exclusive!
The TV movie you speak of sounds eerily similar to this Discovery Channel show I watched last year called End Day, which used the news report method, but did it for all kinds of possible apocalyptic natural disasters. And that was also way more effective than Cloverfield...
I didn't catch them say Lily died...but if they did, then yes that is wayyy dumb. And yes it didn't seem like the copter was trying to get away from the monster at all, you're right! They got closer to it! They weren't an attack copter, were they?
If I may interject, may I just say....HOW COULD YOU NOT LOVE THIS MOVIE!?!?
And yes, I am serious!!
May I inexplicably ask how everyone in No Country for Old Men didn't die halfway through the movie?
Read our comments / blog post if you want to know why we didn't love it! Why would everyone have died halfway through NCFOM? What does NCFOM have to do with this movie?
The two lead characters in No Country for Old Men endured one hell of a gunfight in the middle of the movie where they were both seriously injured, and they both bled for several hours without passing out and/or going into shock and/or dying, yet both of them were still able to carry themselves to the necessary places to get medical care for themselves.
My point? That's very unrealistic, just as unrealistic as surviving a helicopter crash. Did the unrealistic aspect make No Country for Old Men a bad movie? It never crossed my mind.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the reason the cell phones didn't work on 9/11 or on August 1st here was because tons of people were trying to use the same radio tower in the vicinity that allows people to connect their calls with other people. When this monster attacked, people didn't gather around the disaster area, they left! With nobody in the area, this actually makes completing a cell phone call MORE likely because nobody is using that radio tower.
Yes, everyone was good looking, welcome to most movies ever made! The cameraman, by the way, was definitely not good looking.
There were times when the cameraman was actually watching the film that he just recorded, like when the Statue of Liberty head flew by them. So I imagine that after he recorded what he did, he probably turned off the camera, rewound it, and watched some stuff, and he probably didn't stop it at the exact moment when he stopped filming. It probably carried over a few seconds into the "month before" stuff, which is exactly what happened each time.
And by the way, since these other clips were interspersed between the monster attack day filming, that means that the camera wasn't rolling for 10 hours, it was only rolling for the duration of the movie. Why would the cameraman be filming the entire time? You're assuming the government took a 10-hour film and edited out the meaningless stuff, but they left in the personal stuff? That makes no sense! It makes more sense to think that the person filming actually turned the camcorder off every once in a while to save the battery.
As for the military setting up their hospital really fast, there appeared to be tons of military people there who could probably get that stuff set up fast, and I can imagine that in a post-9/11 world, the military is trained to set up a functional hospital in any old place.
To me, it seems like there are reasonable explanations for most of what is listed. But I have to wonder, why are we worried about what's realistic and reasonable in a movie where a giant monster comes out of nowhere and attacks Manhattan? Isn't that pretty damned unrealistic? The point isn't about saying anything about the realism of the world or anything deep at all. The point of this film is to entertain. And as you said, the action was well done, and the images of Manhattan looked very real, which they did.
The movie accomplished exactly what it set out to do, and I for one was very entertained by it. I'm sorry that none of the rest of you were! And wow, this has to be the longest comment ever left on the Blogulator.
Touche, LQ! You raise good points, especially about the camera. I think I didn't explain well enough, though, why the "unrealistic" aspects of it took away what could have been, to me, a great movie.
What I was trying to say was any movie has the ability to set up its own rules within the confines of the movie. For example -- Star Wars -- I know people shouldn't be able to stay in a spaceship like its a car and fly it around without the effect of zero gravity, but I can accept it because it is consistent with how the characters interact, etc. Cloverfield, to me, broke its own internal logic by letting the characters do pretty much whatever they wanted everywhere. And, the storymakers took a truly experimental, interesting, and awesome premise and turned the story into a very typical "Save Grandma" story. It made me care less about their survival, and by the time it was over, I was glad they had died because they were acting so stupidly. That takes away my own enjoyment because I want to root for the characters and not just see cool explosions and be entertained. I want to feel like if something bad happens to the characters, I will be upset. I didn't feel that at all, thus the entertainment value went down for me. I could believe that the characters in No Country for Old Men could survive some shot wounds, because they were all desparate for the money and were so stubborn and focused on their goal that they wouldn't let anything get in their way. I cared about the characters in that movie, mainly because they acted like real humans and made choices that made sense. Nobody really made any sense in Cloverfield.
I agree that parts of it were pretty strange, like when the main guy's brother got killed, and he didn't even get that upset and immediately started thinking about miss one-night-stand, although he did deal with it later in the movie when he had to tell his mom what happened.
But that part where they're on the street and the military comes up and starts firing like 30 machine guns and all kinds of artillery fire at the monster, and the people in the movie run down the street too and duck down into the subway just as the monster shows up above them and screams at them...that was pretty effing cool if you ask me.
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