Cloverfield

On this issue- and I'll have to see this again- when Rob and Hud were in the electronics store, I can't remember if those were batteries he was grabbing and if they were, could they also have been camcorder batteries? Since he was so focused on reaching Beth, that it may be unlikely he was thinking about video for posterity. Someone else can enlighten me here if you distinctly recall what all he was grabbing from the shelf.



Right on.



Exactly. Thanks, Yoda.

According to box office reports, Cloverfield has made through Sunday and estimate of 41 million dollars.

I don't think I'm going to review Cloverfield as Yoda's review is better than I could come up with and covers most of the points I would likely cover.

Since that's the case I'll add my only unique observation in his thread.

I was particularly impressed by the fact that the story didn't try to explain what the creature was or where it came from. The sect of the American culture who tends to like the creature feature sort of film also has, historically, required an explanation about where the creature came from and/or what it is. This inevitably would lead to some on camera research, some laboratory time, some geeky hero solving the puzzle of how to kill the thing and save the world. All of this is notably missing in this film and I, for one, was glad that it was presented that way.

In the extras for The Grudge one of the film makers was discussing the Japanese point of view regarding evil entities. He said that it exists outside of our knowledge and that we are incapable of grasping it anyway so they, culturally, don't explain it. It just is. I'm not saying this beast is 'evil', it's just biology (albeit a strange biology) doin' its thing but I like the idea of not explaining everything to the point of tedium.

I think that the above is illustrative of the problem that people have with the ending. My son (14) protested at first and then he decided he liked it after I said roughly the above to him. There isn't any resolution and there isn't any explanation. It's meant to be street level terror and on the street when things go down it's seldom that one knows what is actually happening until much later.

This film is brilliant in depicting just that.

Yes, I felt the same way, but I figured I could need to pratice some of my writing.

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Ditto

oh, I wasn't knocking anyone elses decision to review the film. I just have several other, probably more obscure films I want to review and since Yoda's review was so perfectly aligned with what I would have said (but he said it better) I just chose not to put forth the energy.

I like to read different takes though so please don't read my post as discouraging.

I didn't say it was discouraging, I was just saying, if you want to become good at reviewing (not that you are bad, you are acctually better then me ) practice makes perfect, so I review anything I watch.

great post and I am definately going to agree with you on all aspects. We live in an information age today and everyone just strives to find out everything about a certain scenario, creature, charcter, etc....they have an image of what they would like to see and are generally disappointed when the result isnt what they depicted.

I love this movie because its footage. Youre seeing, feeling and experiencing exactly what these guys are going through. youre having a great time enjoying your life, then youre put in a situation..where, why and how are not your main concerns anymore, its just survival.

From everything that has gone on since the first trailer showed, especially with all the viral marketing that didn't seem to have all that much to do, directly, with the film, it seems pretty obvious to me that this was intended to be just the first installment of at least 2 films.




Also, The way this was filmed, keeping you almost completely isolated from what was being seen and done outside of the POV of the survivors, really lends itself to basically retelling the same story from another point of view. Perhaps it could be told from a partial prequel standpoint, or even from another group's view during the same time frame (the military?).

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Also, the battery did not have to live that long, it was edited in camera. Meaning we saw exactly what was filmed. The film was 75 minutes long, so the battery lasted 75 minutes. He didn't have it all the entire night. He turned it off from time to time saving power.

It was also probably fully charged for the party.

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Suspect's Reviews

If you check out my long spoiler theory post, you can read that:

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I had thought about that idea, but I have a hard time believing that someone would be thinking about how best to edit the filming so it would look good to a theater audience watching him and his group trying to survive, going about only filming this snippet or that. Yeah, I suppose he didn't really have it running the whole time, but I think it was far more than the 75 minutes you suggested... probably more in the order of 4 hours, some of which was filmed with the on board lighting in use... and speaking of those scenes, without saying anything specific about them as spoilers, the light was on for a reason, and the edits that were done in the film during that time frame would not have made sense for him to have done by him turning it off...


I probably shouldn't have even responded to that post, as it might make it seem that I'm trying to make a silly point against the film, but that's not my intention, just that I do feel its unrealistic to think what was seen in the movie was supposed to be a direct one for one cut from the camera...

Then again, while running his thumb can slip and hit record. I've done that a couple times.

Then again he did say that people should know how it went down, so he may have done it all on purpose.

I assumed that the whole movie was the entire film recorded by them too.
Remember, at the beginning they show it as if the Defence Department is viewing it after recovering the video from 'what once was Central Park'. With the intermixed cuts where we see what was perviously recorded, it looked to me as if this footage was the complete footage (until the DVD version gives us something extra anyway).

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A great trailer. Whoever made that trailer should get an Oscar and an award for tricking people into watching it.

To borrow a quote from someone on the OneLineCritics website

"i liked it the first time, when it was called godzilla"

How DARE Cloverfield make a monster movie involving New York City, I mean let's burn it! Burn down the theaters! It is so a rip-off of Godzilla!

I thought that for the most part, the skip's where explained,

View Spoilers

WARNING: "Skips" spoilers below

them going over the footage of the Statue of Liberty, Jumping to Beth's building, turning it off to go talk to Rob, then turning it back on again

them going over the footage of the Statue of Liberty, Jumping to Beth's building, turning it off to go talk to Rob, then turning it back on again

That was certainly an insightful first post.

Did you actually watch the movie or were you more distracted by whatever mucosal secretions you had going on?

Have you seen ANY Godzilla movies?

What would your reference say (in 100 characters or less).....is she pointing to the Centropolis Production or the plethora of Toho installments?

Please feel free to peruse the worthy commentary in this post (especially the ones over 100 characters) regarding Cloverfield.

Shall you tap into a weightier take on the film, I, for one, await with bated, fiery breath.

the first time i saw the title i thought it's drama.

I'm surprised no one in this thread has compared this movie's POV (knowing only what the main characters know) to War of the Worlds, which got picked on in some segments for also not telling us how the things got here and what was going on elsewhere (for the most part). In that movie as well, I thought that was actually a strength. And it had that same intensity of "all bets are off, survival is everything."

Also, everyone's mentioning how the creature isn't really humanoid like the GIFs seem to portray it, and yet no one's mentioned the obvious reason for that: In the GIF you can't see that the creature's first "elbow" joints are actually backwards from what we're used to seeing in anything remotely humanoid.

That's why those wide shots of the creature lumbering through the city are so darned creepy -- the thing looks like it's semi-crawling on those long, long arm-like appendages and yet they're bending the wrong way with every step. It's just horrid.

Gracie and I came to the conclusion that we thought the "glory shot" of the creature at the end (hovering over Hud) is almost a shame. It almost ruins the creepiness, even while revealing details about the creature's looks. Perhaps that's partly because, yes, it suddenly looks so small. (And, did the bigger wide-angle creature have those flapping orange gills?) Either the proportions were suddenly all off or there is more than one of these things.

I personally had trouble with the camcorder battery working so long. I've owned enough high-battery-drain equipment to know that seems a bit unrealistic. And I'm not convinced they would have charged the battery before the party -- heck, they didn't even think to put in a new tape!

But still ... a minor infraction for the cause.

I wanna buy the soundtrack.

Gracie came away certain that Rob and Beth had ultimately survived. I came away certain they had not. And we were split on whether Lily made it out all right. I said she did, and Gracie said it was uncertain. I assume R&B died because the military were going to "give up" on Manhattan. And yet I kept thinking, if the creature wasn't killed and the creature could go into water, leaving it alone on Manhattan wasn't going to work for long. It could get to anywhere else on the mainland way too easily.

I smell sequel, especially with the movie's good numbers.

Oh, and I knew nothing of the viral marketing beforehand and still only know what I've read here. I'm unsure I want to know more, though.

I liked that we saw that footage in the beginning -- the test pattern and the renamed area of Central Park as numbers and letters, as if they've now gridded the area out for some reason. Would they nuke the area in an attempt to totally destroy the thing? Hmmm.

Great movie, and I usually HATE movies like this. I mean, HATE. But I loved it.

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