Cloverfield (AKA How To Make A Multi-Million Dollar Movie For 13 Bucks)
Ok, so it took me a while to see this one and I know that this post is way overdue. As Jason of jasonwatchesmovies.blogspot.com and I agree this movie sucked. Still making a movie, as those of us who do and who have tried know, is a lot of work so I always try to find something worthwhile to take away from any movie. My film teacher used to say that you should be able to learn something from any movie that you watch and so I will say that I learned how to make a popular movie for about 13 dollars from this one. I can't figure out why it's popular, but I think I've figured out the formula to do so.
First, you make the movie about an hour and a half long, set it in a location that you can reuse sets and props for and spend about 20 minutes on a cheap party scene or other inexpensive bullshit scene that can be filled up with free or underpaid extras. Cloverfield accomplishes this by having an 85 minute movie and spending 18 minutes and 19 seconds on the party scene and things leading up to it. This scene was important to establish the relationships between the 5 main characters, but could have easily started right before Rob opens the door to his surprise party. We would have gotten the point and about 9 minutes of this scene could have been shaved off and used later for more interesting content. I'm all for letting the director shoot a scene for as long as they feel is necessary to set up the rest of the movie, but come on, it's not like they even explained what the hell was going on at any point. This can be easily explained away by saying that the movie is from the characters' point of view, but in this case that is just a cheap cop out. This is of course the second thing you need to do. You need to claim that you are shooting from the point of view of characters that are too dumb to know what or be able to figure out what is going on. That gives you a defense for any criticism your plot may endure later. Just for shits and giggles let's talk about what could have been done with the other 9 minutes. The characters meet experts on the situation about half way through the movie, meaning the Marines, but instead of getting any explanation on anything we get a quick cop out where the marines basically say "If they they know what it is they're no telling us." So we're supposed to believe that after 5 hours of fighting the monster with the most advanced army on the planet no one has any idea what the monster is? As a big Godzilla fan I was really annoyed by this. More on that later. The third thing to do is to kill all of the characters off so you can't start asking question of them at a later point. We all know that Cloverfield accomplishes this by everyone getting killed by the end after tons of really bad camera work.
Let's talk about this concept for a minute. The whole Blair Witch camera work idea. It was a bad idea remember, Blair Withc sucked hard. Still they wanted to establish that the movie was being shot by amateurs. Guess what after 10 minutes of bad camera work I got it, it's supposed to look like an amateur camera man, too bad the fidelity is too high, etc. but I think 10 minutes was enough of that kind of camera work. No one wants to feel like they're going to throw up from simply watching your shots when they're probably going to throw up from the content or lack of content, plot, etc. in your movie anyway.
So how did we end up with such shit? At first I thought it was just a bunch of rich kid writers who had their daddies and mommies use their connections to get them a part writing a bad movie, but I decided to look into it a bit before writing this commentary. It turns out that this movie is very loosely based on some awesome manga with a very in-depth story that the rights may not have been secured to. So now, just like with Michael Bay's Transformers, we have a very rich story line to work from but no one working on the movie uses it. Here is where Cloverfield still could have saved itself. Very few people knew about the Manga and were just in the mood for some awesome monster action, which of course we get about 4 minutes of in this whole pile of shit. Godzilla movies are basically structured in the following way which is good, if not perfect, for monster movies. There is an A,B,C format.
1. Basically there are scientists, space men, astronauts, etc. working on something. 2. It pisses off some huge monster, it is being used to fight a huge monster, or in some way the monsters become involved. 3. This effects regular people too. We end up, at the very least, with a good Sci-Fi story, and usually at least 20 minutes, often more, of monster action which is why we went in the first place. This is why people will watch Godzilla movies, not the 1998 one of course cause that just sucked, but the Toho ones for many years to come but will wipe their asses with Cloverfield cases in the near future when TP runs out at a party.
In then end I would say that the visual effects were good, but nothing we haven't seen before and certainly nothing original. We had mostly no name actors basically playing people from NYC. So basically show up, put these clothes on, say this stuff. So we can't really say we saw any acting here.
So let's recap. The writing was awful and ignored the manga, the actors didn't have to act, the scenes are done in the most popular location for movies to be done making it very cost effective, we see very little of the monster that headlines the movie. Still this movie currently receives about 4 stars on Netflix and 7 on IMDB. So I guess people really are easier to entertain than we used to be. It won't be too much longer before Ass is the most popular movie in America, as Mike Judge has already predicted in Idiocracy. I give this 1 out of 5 stars because the monster kills everyone in the end and therefore helps conserve resources in the long run and get rid of stupid people.
First, you make the movie about an hour and a half long, set it in a location that you can reuse sets and props for and spend about 20 minutes on a cheap party scene or other inexpensive bullshit scene that can be filled up with free or underpaid extras. Cloverfield accomplishes this by having an 85 minute movie and spending 18 minutes and 19 seconds on the party scene and things leading up to it. This scene was important to establish the relationships between the 5 main characters, but could have easily started right before Rob opens the door to his surprise party. We would have gotten the point and about 9 minutes of this scene could have been shaved off and used later for more interesting content. I'm all for letting the director shoot a scene for as long as they feel is necessary to set up the rest of the movie, but come on, it's not like they even explained what the hell was going on at any point. This can be easily explained away by saying that the movie is from the characters' point of view, but in this case that is just a cheap cop out. This is of course the second thing you need to do. You need to claim that you are shooting from the point of view of characters that are too dumb to know what or be able to figure out what is going on. That gives you a defense for any criticism your plot may endure later. Just for shits and giggles let's talk about what could have been done with the other 9 minutes. The characters meet experts on the situation about half way through the movie, meaning the Marines, but instead of getting any explanation on anything we get a quick cop out where the marines basically say "If they they know what it is they're no telling us." So we're supposed to believe that after 5 hours of fighting the monster with the most advanced army on the planet no one has any idea what the monster is? As a big Godzilla fan I was really annoyed by this. More on that later. The third thing to do is to kill all of the characters off so you can't start asking question of them at a later point. We all know that Cloverfield accomplishes this by everyone getting killed by the end after tons of really bad camera work.
Let's talk about this concept for a minute. The whole Blair Witch camera work idea. It was a bad idea remember, Blair Withc sucked hard. Still they wanted to establish that the movie was being shot by amateurs. Guess what after 10 minutes of bad camera work I got it, it's supposed to look like an amateur camera man, too bad the fidelity is too high, etc. but I think 10 minutes was enough of that kind of camera work. No one wants to feel like they're going to throw up from simply watching your shots when they're probably going to throw up from the content or lack of content, plot, etc. in your movie anyway.
So how did we end up with such shit? At first I thought it was just a bunch of rich kid writers who had their daddies and mommies use their connections to get them a part writing a bad movie, but I decided to look into it a bit before writing this commentary. It turns out that this movie is very loosely based on some awesome manga with a very in-depth story that the rights may not have been secured to. So now, just like with Michael Bay's Transformers, we have a very rich story line to work from but no one working on the movie uses it. Here is where Cloverfield still could have saved itself. Very few people knew about the Manga and were just in the mood for some awesome monster action, which of course we get about 4 minutes of in this whole pile of shit. Godzilla movies are basically structured in the following way which is good, if not perfect, for monster movies. There is an A,B,C format.
1. Basically there are scientists, space men, astronauts, etc. working on something. 2. It pisses off some huge monster, it is being used to fight a huge monster, or in some way the monsters become involved. 3. This effects regular people too. We end up, at the very least, with a good Sci-Fi story, and usually at least 20 minutes, often more, of monster action which is why we went in the first place. This is why people will watch Godzilla movies, not the 1998 one of course cause that just sucked, but the Toho ones for many years to come but will wipe their asses with Cloverfield cases in the near future when TP runs out at a party.
In then end I would say that the visual effects were good, but nothing we haven't seen before and certainly nothing original. We had mostly no name actors basically playing people from NYC. So basically show up, put these clothes on, say this stuff. So we can't really say we saw any acting here.
So let's recap. The writing was awful and ignored the manga, the actors didn't have to act, the scenes are done in the most popular location for movies to be done making it very cost effective, we see very little of the monster that headlines the movie. Still this movie currently receives about 4 stars on Netflix and 7 on IMDB. So I guess people really are easier to entertain than we used to be. It won't be too much longer before Ass is the most popular movie in America, as Mike Judge has already predicted in Idiocracy. I give this 1 out of 5 stars because the monster kills everyone in the end and therefore helps conserve resources in the long run and get rid of stupid people.
posted by baceman007 at 7:46 PM
1 Comments:
Hey Baceman. Sorry I didn't respond to this sooner.
I didn't take as much offense to this movie as you did. I thought it was an intersting idea, and some noteworthy technical achievement in combining CGI and hand-held "shakycam" video. However, there are giant plot holes (I had to laugh when the main character is trying to check his messages on his cell phone and somehow gets everyone to be quite--not just everyone in the store but the military and giant monster fighting outside.
Home video can be a useful technique for enhancing the realism of a story, but you're right on that it didn't work here--scenes were too clear. I actually complained that there was too clear of a look at the monster (should've gone "Jaws" and kept the shark hidden as much as possible, if that's what they were going for).
Examples of movies that use this technique better: "Diary of the Dead", "Quarantine", "Jimmy and Judy", and "Paranormal Activity" (if the original version is ever released). What these have in common is a better backstory of why the characters are filming stuff. In "Diary of the Dead" and "Quarantine", they're journalists, so it makes sense that stuff is shot well. In "Jimmy and Judy" Jimmy is obsessed with filming everything, so has gotten good at it. And in "Paranormal Activity" they're setting up security cameras and trying to capture evidence of ghosts. In none of these films are people just running around with cameras for no reason.
I didn't know about the manga it's based on. Depending on how badly they fucked up the source material, I might downgrade my opinion even more.
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