saw it, i thought it was good. something different, not really scary but i kept trying to figure out what the thing was throughout the whole movie, it wasnt anything like i had imagined it. good flick, go see it
questions: Spoiler 1) when Hud got 'eated' by da monster, how the hell did he (well, his body anyway) and the camera end up surviving that? 2) the little crab-dogs. wtf. ok. if that isnt lifted directly from a FPS video game i dont know what is. 3) statue of liberty's head gets thrown all the way across NYC? what for exactly? is mister monster just trying to rub his c*** in our patriotic faces? osama bin-monster on da loose! 4) this movie harped so directly on post 9-11 fears. it was shameful in places. a cheap tactic. 5) why did monsty just randomly emerge from the carpet bombing and jump up and hit their helicopter? i mean seriously. the thing looks pretty much bound to the ground for the -whole- movie then he turns into michael jordan and smacks da choppa? sure. 6) speaking of crashing helicopters. they all would have died in that crash. shoulda ended the movie there. 7) beth was impaled on rebar for what, 4-5 hours? hard to believe she wouldnt have bled to death. but she's hot. so im glad she didn't. yeeeaaauhh!! 8) was anyone else expecting lily to slip and fall off the collapsed high rise? that woulda been awesome 9) when Hud's crush got bit the army nurse yelled "WE GOT A BITE!!" and everyone freaking panics like the girl is gonna turn into a freaking zombie-monstertruck-vampure-wolf-spider or something. then she just asploded. popped like a pimple. so apparently they have a tent set up just for people to asplode in? how nice of them. 10) anybody else "LOL" at the fact the dude was moving to Japan, home of the monsterattack, and yet the monster attack took place here? little irony for us all
I sat further back than I normally do for most movies. That might have helped me. I didn't get as queasy as I thought I might.
Monster - I think there's enough in the movie to say it came from space: -->If it were from the deep sea, how'd it up and grow a pair of lungs all of a sudden? -->The earthquake: NYC doesn't get them, but if something crashed into the bedrock you'd get one. -->The explosion (by the Chrysler Building? Empire?) was pre-military arrival, and we don't see the monster shoot fire ever. Was that a second smaller crash landing? The monster grabbing/slamming a helicopter? Anyway, my guess is that the monster crash landed just on the far side of Ellis Island. Shallow enough harbor not to create a tidal wave, hard enough to cause a quake, and nearby Lady Liberty for the pointless head toss. There was certainly a TON of cringe moments of unbelievability: Beth *might* have lived with the rod through her shoulder, but the second she was pulled off it? Immediate bleed out, let alone she's able to go down 60 flights of stairs and sprint through the streets. The helicopter taking off with the monster wrecking havoc right there, and then flying right above it despite active bombings. All 3 surviving the copter crash - That was ridiculous. Still - it was kind of neat. A Godzilla movie all on the ground level perspective. I wasn't letdown - I actually expected the monster to ruin it for me and it didn't. Evan
But the monster attacked an oil rig off of the coast of Connecticut at least a week before the New York attack. I don't think it came from space.
I saw a really good explanation about the deep sea monster theory. it had something to do with the fact that at the deepest reaches of the ocean are such an oxygen low environment that a creature of that size would be able to spend lots of time on land without breathing, or maybe it surfaced once in a while, took a big old breath and went down again? also, being in the deep deep sea would cause its internal structure to withstand massive MASSIVE amounts of pressure, which would explain its ridiculously tough "rockets dont hurt me lol" reaction to attack. i dunno, its all a buncha doodie anyway HEAD CRABS YALL!!
the splash in the water at the end is supposedly a satellite or something.. the internet back/pre-story to this movie is ridiculous its like movies nowadays are "some assembly required"... they expect you to do the research yourself BEFORE going in order to understand
Re: #3 Spoiler It was an homage to Escape From New York. The poster for that movie had a decapitated Statue of Liberty even though it never appeared in the film. Abrams liked the idea and the imagery.
I didn't think there really was an earthquake but if you follow the "look behind them on the video" line of thinking, the monster arrived during the day they were at Coney Island.
Well I just got back from seeing the movie and I loved it. I think the thing that struck me the most is the authenticity of it. It feels like you really are just watching real footage from a camcorder or real media reports. And you never stray from that point of view. It's not the first time it's been done but it's certainly the best executed. Now I didn't see any of the marketing campaign outside of the trailers, but I understand exactly what the filmmakers were trying to do and I didn't feel cheated in any way. Some movies are better without tying things off in nice, neat little bows. And I really could care less (though I'll probably hunt down some of the backstory into the monster now) what the monster is and where it came from or really anything else for that matter; that's not what the point of the movie was at all and that's what I love about it. If the filmmakers tried to answer every single question we all had (and presumably the characters in the movie had), then you would have to jump out of that 1st person perspective; end result would be a movie that's not any different from all the other monster/horror/sci fi films that have come before it. So I applaud the filmmakers for trying something fresh. As for the characters, their actions and the decisions they make. Within any movie, you have to accept a certain amount of disbelief...and of course this is no different: Spoiler Rod going back to save the girl; might be a little unrealistic, but then given the circumstances...he tried to escape and the bridge was destroyed, so he's back in harms way anyways; plus his brother is dead so I imagine he wanted to do everything in his power to keep someone else he loved from dying too...given that I can see why he would want to go back, I'd probably do that myself. The fact that she was still alive...well if the rebar was in her shoulder and not hitting any major arteries or anything and she was bleeding out slowly (which seems very possible considering she wasn't moving at all) it's not a stretch to imagine she'd still be alive when they got there. Pulling off the bar would of course cause her to bleed out more, but they did dress the wound, so again I don't think it's hard to suggest she could have survived that (now being able to move pretty well and then flat out running after that is fairly unrealistic...but again if that's never happened to you personally and you haven't had a huge-ass monster chasing after how can you possibly know how you will react) Fact is I've seen much worse in terms of believability in other films...much, much worse. Then the monster jumping up and grapping the helicpoter; I can't see why it would be low enough to be in harms way, but then again it was above the skyline and they might have thought they were at a safe height; and then they all survive the crash relatively intact while the pilots do not....pretty far fetched that they do survive and that only one of them is hurt, but again it's possible. Maybe the chopper hit the ground nose first. I dunno. But just because person A dies from the crash doesn't mean person B and C have to die too. It doesn't always happen that way. And then why didn't the monster just dive back into the ocean from where it came if it was scared by all the "bees." JJ Abrahms likens it to a baby. Well anyone that has an infant would know, that when it gets scared or confused or agitated, it doesn't run away...because a baby doesn't quite understand why its feeling the way it's feeling. So what is the baby gonna do...cry and scream...in this case the monster runs amok aimlessly. Makes perfect sense to me. I think the minor unrealistic issues the film had were far outweighed by everything else. Spoiler But I do kind of wish we could have found out what happened to Rod and Beth, since you become so invested in them...kind of like in Children of Men...just throw me a bone...just a little....but I understand why they didn't
I went last night and I loved it. I liked that there are questions left. I liked the POV. I liked it all.
"Cloverfield" a monster at box office "Cloverfield," a low-budget Godzilla-style horror movie, scared up a monstrous $41 million opening at the weekend box office in North America, almost twice the tally of the new romance "27 Dresses." According to studio estimates issued on Sunday, "27 Dresses" opened at No. 2 with $22.4 million, while last weekend's champ "The Bucket List" fell to No. 3 with almost $15.2 million. The top-10 contained one other new release, "Mad Money," which opened at No. 7 with just $7.7 million. "Cloverfield," a $25 million movie with a no-name cast from Paramount Pictures, set a record for a January release, surpassing the $35.9 million reissue of "Star Wars" in 1997. It will also set a record for the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. "Black Hawk Down" earned $33.6 million during the four-day period in 2002. Paramount said its movie will earn more than $47 million after the Monday holiday is included. Box office observers had expected "Cloverfield" to open in the $20 million range for the three-day period, a little ahead of "27 Dresses." They largely discounted Paramount's unusual forecast last week that the order would be reversed. While the two movies appeared to target completely different audiences delineated by gender, the positively-reviewed "Cloverfield" played more broadly than expected. Paramount said men comprised 60 percent of the audience, and 55 percent of moviegoers were aged under 25. The audience for "27 Dresses" was three-quarters female, Fox said. RAMPAGE ACROSS NEW YORK "Cloverfield" marks a reunion between director Matt Reeves and producer J.J. Abrams, the creators of the cult TV show "Felicity." Seen exclusively through the lens of a camcorder, it follows a group of youngsters on the run from a monster rampaging across New York. Paramount, a unit of Viacom Inc, employed a word-of-mouth marketing campaign for the film, highlighting the image of a beheaded Statue of Liberty. Fox spent the previous two weekends holding sneak previews of "27 Dresses," which stars "Grey's Anatomy" actress Katherine Heigl as a perennial bridesmaid. The News Corp-owned studio said the opening was "fantastic." The film held at No. 1 in Australia for a second week, it added. Critics ripped both "27 Dresses" and "Mad Money," which also targets female moviegoers. "Mad Money" stars Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes as masterminds of an unlikely bank heist. It marks the debut release of Overture Films, a unit of Liberty Media Corp.'s cable TV operator Starz LLC. Overture said the movie would be profitable, especially after DVD sales are factored in. Elsewhere, the total for Warner Bros. Pictures' comedy "The Bucket List," starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, rose to $42.7 million. Fox Searchlight Pictures' teen-pregnancy comedy "Juno" slipped one to No. 4 with $10.3 million, taking its total to $85.4 million. The film began its international campaign in Australia, opening at No. 5, the studio said. "National Treasure: Book of Secrets" fell one to No. 5 with $8.1 million. Walt Disney Co's Nicolas Cage adventure movie has earned $198 million to date. Woody Allen's thriller "Cassandra's Dream" opened poorly in limited release, earning $400,000 from 107 theaters. It was distributed by the Weinstein Co, which is run by Miramax Films founders Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Link
I loved the movie. Granted for the first 10-15 minutes we were going wtf this is pathetic. And as soon as the people were walking out of the dust cloud i immediately had visions of 9/11. My friend and i were the only people in the cinema who were laughing to most of what the guy holding the camera was saying. My friend was doing it discretely but i was laughing loudly several times. I don't know how to do the whole 'show spoiler' thing so there's a bit of the movie in the below paragraph. .... .... When they're walking through the subway and they first get attacked by the little freaks - and later they get in the room camera man says to his stoned wannabe girlfriend "they tried to carry me away... what was with that? " I thought that was the funniest thing ever
