If you cared, you could speculate: Was this a newGodzilla?
The release date was 1-18-08, and those are numbers, andLosthas numbers: Dharma Initiative, maybe?
Cloverfieldwas actually a movie that came out in theaters.
Michele K. Short
Between its first and second weekend, the box office declined 68 percent.
But the Bad Robot advertising strategy can overwhelm and obscure the actual movie behind them.
This was never really the point ofCloverfieldthe movie.
Michele K. Short
There are no answers, because there arent really any questions.
The monster is a monster, and the fact of its monstrosity is taken for granted.
As a singular movie experience, I actually kind of loveCloverfield.
Youve got Lizzy Caplan and T.J. Miller, future hipster-comedy stars playing rough 2008 pastiches of hipsterdom.
(Her: Withdrawn, eye-shadowed, not that into you.
Him: Awkward lout-nerd with a camera fixation.)
(Collectively, theyve gone on to star in nine TV shows, all short-lived.)
InCloverfield, the main characters arent important.
They gain no insight into the terror tormenting them.
(Like us, they never find out what the monster is.)
They die in the middle of a greater story they will never understand.
10 Cloverfield Laneis better in almost every conceivable way than the firstCloverfield.
The concept of10 Cloverfield Laneisnt new.
There are people trapped together.
Outside, the world has ended, maybe, and there are monsters, maybe.
And the fun of10 Cloverfield Lane, initially, is that the characters all have mystery.
The nice boy with the broken arm is actually a nice dude.
John Goodman is exactly as crazy as he looks like it’s.
But as an exercise in tension,10 Cloverfield Laneworks.
And right about then is when the floating space-squidship appears.
Did you like the ending of10 Cloverfield Lane?
Im still struggling with it.
What had been a tense human-sized story becomes a ludicrous special effects action movie.
But it also seems to violate some essential Big Idea underlying the movie.
At Minute 90, the movie says: The real monster is us.
By Minute 100, the movie says: Never mind, the real monster is the hovering crustacean vacuum!
But10 Cloverfield Laneargues, quite the opposite, that the whole franchise idea has become something like an infection.
For 90 minutes of running time, Winstead plays a genuine human being.
The monster in the originalCloverfielddidnt make sense, either.
God help those brave souls who are once again debating frame-by-frame easter eggs searching for clues towardCloverfields underlying mythology.
Because the truth is that thereisnoCloverfieldmythology.
The monsters are just trailer concepts for monsters, scary Things defined by nothing beyond their Thingness.
Most great science-fiction lands on the idea that monsters are somehow human.
TheCloverfieldfranchise never gets past the superficial notion that monsters are scary and weird and gross.
But at least the firstCloverfieldtold a complete story about characters trapped in a world they didnt understand.
Compared to that, the ending of10 Cloverfield Lanefeels like a betrayal.
Winstead gets the end-of-a-superhero-movie-moment, driving off into the distance toward further adventures with alien squid-insect monsters.
She might as well talk about how she really misses her Uncle Ben.)
But it also strikes me that10 Cloverfield Laneis more cynical about its ownCloverfield-ness.
Did people gripe about how pointless the characters in the first movie were?
Fine: Lets show Winstead exploding an alien spaceship, just like Cruise inWar of the Worlds.
And theres an angle on the end of where the ending almost feels like an apology.
Sorry you had to sit through all that dialogue stuff…
Here, we spent 40 percent of the budget on an alien dog-raptor with eyeball teeth.
And I am not against alien dog-raptors with eyeball teeth!
But I wonder: Did the ending of10 Cloverfield Lanework for you?
Did you feel like it worked better than the tragic finale of the originalCloverfield?
