Cloverfield

For the creature of the film, see Cloverfield (creature).

Cloverfield
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Matt Reeves
Written by	Drew Goddard
Produced by	J.J. Abrams Bryan Burk
Starring	Michael Stahl-David T. J. Miller Jessica Lucas Odette Yustman Lizzy Caplan Mike Vogel
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release dates	January 18, 2008
Running time	84 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$30 million
Box office	Domestic $79,613,339 Foreign $77,579,613 Worldwide $157,192,952

Cloverfield is a 2008 monster/horror film directed by Matt Reeves, produced by J. J. Abrams and written by Drew Goddard. Prior to the film's release, Paramount Pictures carried out a viral marketing campaign to promote the film. The campaign included viral tie-ins similar to the Lost Experience. The film follows five young New Yorkers who throw their friend a going-away party on the same night that a gigantic monster attacks the city. First publicized within a teaser trailer in screenings of Transformers, the film was released on January 17 in New Zealand and Australia, on January 18 in North America, and on February 1 in Ireland, in the UK and in Italy.

Plot summary

The film is presented as a series of scenes taken by a digital hand-held camera obtained by the United States Department of Defense pertaining to Case Designate "Cloverfield" found in US-447, an area "formerly known as Central Park". The footage that comprises the rest of the film is shot under the context of a personal hand-held camera used by various characters throughout the film's events.

On April 27 at 6:42am, Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David) awakens after spending the night with longtime friend Beth (Odette Yustman) in her father's Columbus Circle apartment. They plan to visit Coney Island for the day.

On May 22, Rob's brother Jason (Mike Vogel) and his girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas) prepare a Manhattan apartment for Rob's farewell party, as he has accepted a job in his company's office in Japan. Rob's best friend "Hud" (T. J. Miller) is given a camera and the responsibility of recording final goodbyes from family and friends at the party, but uses this responsibility to try to unsuccessfully flirt with his crush, Marlena (Lizzy Caplan).

Beth arrives with a date, Travis (Ben Feldman), which upsets Rob. To his dismay, he realizes Hud is taping over a video of him and Beth, including their trip to Coney Island, which shows up intermittently throughout the film as a result in non sequitur fashion.

Lily reveals Rob and Beth slept together several weeks previously, and Beth is mad at him for not talking to her since. Rob provokes Beth and her date into abruptly leaving the party.

Later during the party, the building suffers a brief blackout and begins to rock with earthquake-like intensity, and as deafening roars can be heard emanating from outside, Hud catches many responses to the noises on the camera. When the power returns, everyone turns on the local news, where the anchor explains that an oil tanker has capsized in the bay off Lower Manhattan. Panicked and curious party goers go up to the roof to spot the disaster, where they witness an explosion in lower Manhattan and flee to the streets, when suddenly the head of the Statue of Liberty, damaged and charred, crashes beside them. Hud is able to catch a glimpse of what seems to be a giant monster on the camera as it passes between two skyscrapers further down the street. The Woolworth Building then collapses in its wake, causing Rob, Jason, Hud and Lily to take refuge in a nearby convenience store. After the confusion and panic, the streets fall silent, and the group finds Marlena outside, obviously shaken by the events, who mentions that she saw the monster and it was eating people caught in its path.

Rob, Jason, Hud, Marlena, and Lily join a crowd leaving the city on foot via the Brooklyn Bridge. While walking across, Rob gets a call from a distressed Beth, who is stuck in her father's apartment unable to move. Rob's cell phone battery dies shortly before the bridge is partially destroyed by the monster's tail, killing Jason and countless other pedestrians. The remaining four retreat to Manhattan while grieving over Jason. Rob enters a nearby electronics store and acquires a new battery for his cell phone. Hud notices military forces arriving outside the store, and sees a news report of the monster rubbing against a building, which then switches to a televised battle in which soldiers are being attacked by dog-sized, parasitic arthropods which have fallen off the monster's body. After some protest between each other, the group decides to go with Rob to rescue Beth.

After being caught between the monster and an ineffectual military response, the friends move into the Spring Street subway station. As they walk through the subway tunnel towards Beth's apartment, they notice hordes of rats fleeing in the same direction they are going. After engaging the camera's night vision to see what's behind them, they are attacked by several parasites, one of which bites Marlena. The group escapes into an abandoned department store, and are engaged by Sergeant Pryce and a squad of infantry who had taken cover inside the shop and set up an army field hospital, to treat hundreds of wounded people. A dead soldier with a ruptured torso is wheeled by, at which point, Marlena is feeling faint and has begun bleeding out of all orifices. With Rob, Hud, and Lily protesting, she is rushed behind a paramedic's screen where she viscerally explodes. Clearly upset, Rob and the others argue with the military guards to allow them to continue in their search for Beth. After a little bit of talking, the sympathetic sergeant leads them to the streets, but warns them to report to a military evacuation site before 6:00 AM, which is when the last chopper evacuates Manhattan and the military will enact its hammer down protocol. All of Manhattan will be destroyed.

The group continues to Beth's apartment, finding her tower partially collapsed into another; they climb the standing tower and cross onto the leaning tower's roof and work their way down to Beth's apartment. The three find her shoulder impaled by a piece of steel concrete rebar. After the painful rescue, they see the monster up close. Another parasite shows up, but Rob heavily injures it with a fire axe. As they make their way to an aerial evacuation site near Grand Central Terminal, they encounter the monster once again, while the military continues to ineffectively attack it with M109 howitzer mobile artillery units, one of which is destroyed as the group flees. As they reach the landing zone, Lily is forced into a departing UH-1N marine helicopter without her friends. Rob, Beth and Hud board another helicopter, where they witness an Air Force B-2 Spirit stealth bomber commencing a carpet bombing attack directly on the monster. The monster appears to be struck down by the attack when seconds later, it reemerges from the smoke and strikes the helicopter. The aircraft violently crashes, landing into the middle of Central Park. The three survive the crash mostly uninjured and hear a voice on the helicopter's radio receiver warning of the hammer down protocol in fifteen minutes. They climb out of the wreckage, only to come face to face with the monster itself. It curiously examines Hud for a few moments and then grabs hold of him in it's mouth, killing him. It then spits and Rob retrieves the camera and flees the scene with Beth.

The pair take shelter under a bridge in Central Park as air raid sirens begin to blare in the distance, indicating that the hammer down protocol is about to occur. Rob and Beth quickly take turns leaving their last testimonies on camera, just as numerous explosions occur. The bridge above them is blown to pieces by a bomb, and as debris covers the camera, the monster is heard roaring, Rob and Beth can be heard professing their love to one another before the recording is cut.

The tape then cuts to footage recorded during Rob and Beth's Coney Island date several weeks prior to the incident. As they talk on a Ferris wheel, a distant object can be seen falling into the sea. At the end of the closing credits, a short, largely unintelligible radio transmission, whose voice may be that of Rob, is played {cite web | url=http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/10946 |title=Origin of the 'Cloverfield' Monster Revealed... IN MOVIE! |publisher=Bloody-disgusting.com |accessdate=2008-01-22}}</ref>.

Cast

Further information: List of characters in the Cloverfield universe

• Michael Stahl-David as Rob Hawkins
• T. J. Miller as Hudson "Hud" Platt
• Jessica Lucas as Lily Ford
• Odette Yustman as Beth McIntyre
• Lizzy Caplan as Marlena Diamond
• Mike Vogel as Jason Hawkins

To prevent the leaking of plot information, instead of auditioning the actors with scenes from the film, scripts from Abrams' previous productions were used, such as television series Alias and Lost. Some scenes were also written specifically for the audition process, not intended for use in the film. Despite not being told the premise of the film, Lizzy Caplan stated that she accepted a role in Cloverfield solely because she was a fan of the Abrams-produced television series Lost, and her experience of discovering its true nature initially caused her to state that she would not sign on for a film in the future "without knowing full well what it is." She indicated that her character was a sarcastic outsider, and that her role was "physically demanding."

Production

Development

The poster for Escape from New York (1981) inspired the scene of the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty in Cloverfield

J. J. Abrams conceived of a new monster after he and his son visited a toy store in Japan while promoting Mission: Impossible III. He explained, "We saw all these Godzilla toys, and I thought, we need our own [American] monster, and not like King Kong. I love King Kong. King Kong is adorable. And Godzilla is a charming monster. We love Godzilla. But I wanted something that was just insane, and intense." In February 2007, Paramount Pictures secretly greenlit Cloverfield, to be produced by Abrams, directed by Matt Reeves, and written by Drew Goddard. The project was produced by Abrams' company, Bad Robot Productions.

While writing Cloverfield, writer Drew Goddard frequently played Fall Out Boy's Infinity On High as his background music while working. He has admitted that much of the film is inspired by the album, although the scenes and songs do not match up.

The decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty was inspired by the poster of the 1981 film Escape from New York, which had shown the head lying in the streets in New York. According to Reeves, "It's an incredibly provocative image. And that was the source that inspired producer J. J. Abrams to say, 'Now this would be an interesting idea for a movie.'"

The film was titled Cloverfield from the beginning, but the title changed throughout production before it was finalized as the original title. Matt Reeves explained that the title was changed frequently due to the hype caused by the teaser trailer, "That excitement spread to such a degree that we suddenly couldn't use the name anymore. So we started using all these names like Slusho and Cheese. And people always found out what we were doing!" The director said that "Cloverfield" was the government's case designate for the monster, comparing the titling to that of the Manhattan Project. "And it's not a project per se. It's the way that this case has been designated. That's why that is on the trailer, and it becomes clearer in the film. It's how they refer to this phenomenon [or] this case," said the director. The film's final title, "Cloverfield", is the name of the exit Abrams takes to his Santa Monica office.

Filming

The casting process was carried out in secret, with no script being sent out to candidates. With production estimated to have a budget of $30 million, filming began in mid-June in New York. One cast member indicated that the film would look like it cost $150 million, despite producers not casting recognizable and expensive actors. Filmmakers used the Sony CineAlta F23 high-definition video camera to film nearly all of the New York exterior scenes. Filming took place on Coney Island, with scenes being shot at Deno's Wonder Wheel Amusement Park and the B&B Carousel. Some interior shots were filmed on a soundstage at Downey, California. The film was shot and edited in a cinéma vérité style, to look like it was filmed with one hand-held camera, including jump cuts similar to ones found in home movies. T. J. Miller who plays Hud, has said in various interviews that he filmed a third of the movie and mostly half of it made it into the movie. Director Matt Reeves described the presentation, "We wanted this to be as if someone found a Handicam, took out the tape and put it in the player to watch it. What you're watching is a home movie that then turns into something else." Reeves explained that the pedestrians documenting the severed head of the Statue of Liberty with the camera phones was reflective of the contemporary period. According to him: "Cloverfield very much speaks to the fear and anxieties of our time, how we live our lives. Constantly documenting things and putting them up on YouTube, sending people videos through e-mail – we felt it was very applicable to the way people feel now."

Creature design

Main article: Cloverfield (creature)

Visual main effects supervisor Phil Tippett and his company Tippett Studio were enlisted to develop the visual effects for Cloverfield. Because the visual effects were incorporated after filming, cast members had to react to a non-existent creature during scenes, only being familiar with early conceptual renderings of the beast. Artist Neville Page designed the monster, thoroughly creating a biological rationale for the creature, even if many of his ideas like "elongated, and articulated external esophagus" would not show up on screen. The key idea behind the monster was that he was an immature creature suffering from "separation anxiety". This recalls real-life elephants who get frightened and lash out at the circus, because the director felt "there's nothing scarier than something huge that's spooked".

Marketing

Filmmakers decided to create a teaser trailer that would be a surprise in the light of commonplace media saturation, which they put together during the preparation stage of the production process. The teaser was then used as a basis for the film itself. Paramount Pictures encouraged the teaser to be released without a title attached, and the Motion Picture Association of America approved the move. As Transformers showed high tracking numbers before its release in July 2007, the studio attached the teaser trailer for Cloverfield that showed the release date of January 18 2008 but not the title. A second trailer was released on November 16, 2007, which confirmed the title.

The studio had kept knowledge of the project secret from the online community, a cited rarity due to the presence of scoopers that follow upcoming films. The controlled release of information on the film has been observed as a risky strategy, which could succeed like The Blair Witch Project (1999) or disappoint like Snakes on a Plane (2006), the latter of which had generated online hype but failed to attract large audiences. Chad Hartigan of Exhibitor Relations Co. viewed the several issues with the potential of the film, including a lack of major stars, the underwhelming performance of Godzilla-style films in America, and the film's slated release in January, considered a "dumping ground for bad films".

Pre-release plot speculation

The sudden appearance of the untitled trailer for Cloverfield fueled media speculation over the film's plot. USA Today reported the possibilities of the film being based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft, a live-action adaptation of Voltron, a new film about Godzilla, or a spin-off of the TV show Lost. The Star Ledger also reported the possibility of the film being based on Lovecraft lore or Godzilla. The Guardian also reported the possibility of a Lost spin-off, while Time Out reported that the film was about an alien called The Parasite. IGN also backed the possibility of the same premise, with The Parasite rumored to be a working title for the film. Online, Slusho and Colossus had also been discussed as possible titles. Entertainment Weekly also disputed reports that the film would be about a parasite or a colossal Asian robot such as Voltron.

Visitors of the website Ain't It Cool News have pointed out 9/11 allusions based on the destruction in New York City such as the decapitated Statue of Liberty. The film has also drawn alternate reality game enthusiasts that have followed other viral marketing campaigns like those set up for the TV series Lost, the video game Halo 2, the Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero, and the upcoming Batman film The Dark Knight. Members of the forums at argn.com and unfiction.com have investigated the background of the film, with the "1-18-08" section at Unfiction generating over 7,700 posts in August 2007. The members have studied photographs on the film's official site, potentially related MySpace profiles, and the Comic-Con teaser poster for the film. A popular piece of fan art posited that the monster was a mutated blue whale.

Viral tie-ins

File:1-18-08.JPG

Photos on the 1-18-08.com viral marketing website.

Puzzle websites containing Lovecraftian elements, such as Ethan Haas Was Right, were originally reported to be connected to the film. On July 9 2007, producer J. J. Abrams stated that, while a number of websites were being developed to market the film, the only official site that had been found was 1-18-08.com. At the site, a collection of time-coded photos are provided to visitors to piece together a series of events and interpret their meanings; the pictures can also be flipped over - by a swift movement of the mouse. Also, leaving the website open for 6 minutes plays a recording of the monster's roar.

As part of the viral marketing campaign, the drink Slusho! has served as a tie-in. The drink had previously appeared in producer Abrams' previous creation, the TV series Alias. Viral websites for Slusho! and a Japanese drilling company named Tagruato (タグルアト, Taguruato) were launched to add to the mythology of Cloverfield. When Cloverfield was hosted at Comic-Con 2007, gray Slusho! t–shirts were distributed to attendees. Fans who had registered at the Slusho! website for Cloverfield received e-mails of fictional sonar images prior to the film's release that showed a deep-sea creature heading toward Manhattan.

Producer Bryan Burk explained the viral tie-in, "[It] was all done in conjunction with the studio… The whole experience in making this movie is very reminiscent [of] how we did Lost." Director Matt Reeves described Slusho! as "part of the involved connectivity" with Abrams' Alias and that the drink represented a "meta-story" for Cloverfield. The director explained, "It's almost like tentacles that grow out of the film and lead, also, to the ideas in the film. And there's this weird way where you can go see the movie and it's one experience… But there's also this other place where you can get engaged where there's this other sort of aspect for all those people who are into that. […] All the stories kind of bounce off one another and inform each other. But, at the end of the day, this movie stands on its own to be a movie. […] The Internet sort of stories and connections and clues are, in a way, a prism and they're another way of looking at the same thing. To us, it's just another exciting aspect of the storytelling."

Merchandise

A four installment manga series by Yoshiki Togawa titled Cloverfield/Kishin (クローバーフィールド／ＫＩＳＨＩＮ, Kurōbāfīrudo/KISHIN) is being released by Japanese publisher Kadokawa Shoten. The story focuses on a Japanese high school student named Kishin Aiba, who somehow bears a connection to the monster, and will serve as a prequel to the film.

Based on the successful opening weekend of Cloverfield in theaters, Hasbro began accepting orders for a 14-inch collectible toy figure of the monster with authentic sound and its parasites to be shipped to fans by September 30 2008.

There are also rare Cloverfield apparell items including T-shirts featuring the classic Cloverfield poster logo.

Soundtrack

Main article: Cloverfield Mix

Cloverfield, due to its presentation as footage from a consumer digital recorder, possesses no film score, save for the composition "ROAR! (Cloverfield Overture)" by Michael Giacchino that plays over the end credits, but is not featured on the soundtrack CD. The CD is in a mixtape fashion and contains the popular music played during Rob's going away party. The CD also is titled under the name "Rob's Party Mix" and was not officially released to retail, but is available for download on iTunes.

Reception

Cloverfield opened in 3,411 theaters on January 18, 2008 and grossed a total of $16,930,000 on its opening day in the United States and Canada. It made $40,058,229 on its opening weekend, making it the most successful January release gross of all time. Worldwide, it has grossed $152,959,793, making it the first movie in 2008 to gross over $100 million. The film was mostly praised by critics. As of February 12 2008, review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 77% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 158 reviews. According to Metacritic, the film has received an average critic score of 64%, based on 35 reviews.

Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle calls the film "the most intense and original creature feature I've seen in my adult moviegoing life […] a pure-blood, grade A, exultantly exhilarating monster movie." He cites Matt Reeves' direction, the "whip-smart, stylistically invisible" script and the "nearly subconscious evocation of our current paranoid, terror-phobic times" as the keys to the film's success, saying that telling the story through the lens of one character's camera "works fantastically well." Michael Rechtshaffen of The Hollywood Reporter called it "chillingly effective", praising the effects and the film's "claustrophobic intensity". He said that though the characters "aren't particularly interesting or developed", there was "something refreshing about a monster movie that isn't filled with the usual suspects." Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly said that the film was "surreptitiously subversive, [a] stylistically clever little gem", and that while the characters were "vapid, twenty-something nincompoops" and the acting "appropriately unmemorable", the decision to tell the story through amateur footage was "brilliant". Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that the film is "pretty scary at times" and cites "unmistakable evocations of 9/11". He concludes that "all in all, it is an effective film, deploying its special effects well and never breaking the illusion that it is all happening as we see it."

Todd McCarthy of Variety called the film an "old-fashioned monster movie dressed up in trendy new threads", praising the special effects, "nihilistic attitude" and "post-9/11 anxiety overlay", but said, "In the end, [it's] not much different from all the marauding creature features that have come before it." Scott Foundas of LA Weekly was critical of the film's use of scenes reminiscent of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City and called it "cheap and opportunistic". He suggested that the film was engaging in "stealth" attempts at social commentary and compared this unfavorably to the films of Don Siegel, George A. Romero and Steven Spielberg, saying, "Where those filmmakers all had something meaningful to say about the state of the world and […] human nature, Abrams doesn't have much to say about anything." Manohla Dargis in the New York Times called the allusions "tacky", saying, "[The images] may make you think of the attack, and you may curse the filmmakers for their vulgarity, insensitivity or lack of imagination", but that "the film is too dumb to offend anything except your intelligence." She concludes that the film "works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt." Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com calls the film "badly constructed, humorless and emotionally sadistic", and sums up by saying that the film "takes the trauma of 9/11 and turns it into just another random spectacle at which to point and shoot." Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune warned that the viewer may feel "queasy" at the references to September 11, but that "other sequences […] carry a real jolt" and that such tactics were "crude, but undeniably gripping". He called the film "dumb", but "quick and dirty and effectively brusque", concluding that despite it being "a harsher, more demographically calculating brand of fun", he enjoyed the film. Bruce Paterson of Cinephilia described the film as "a successful experiment in style but not necessarily a successful story for those who want dramatic closure."

Shaky camerawork

Sign at an AMC theater warning customers

The movie was filmed using shaky camerawork, as it was filmed by hand-held video camera with one of the characters, Hud. However, this style of cinematography leads some who view it inside dark movie theaters to experience vertigo, causing nausea and a temporary loss of balance. Some theaters showing the film have posted warnings, informing viewers about the filming style of Cloverfield.

DVD release

The DVD is confirmed by Paramount Home Entertainment to be released on April 22,2008. It will be released in two versions: The normal one disc version and an exclusive Steel-Book special edition sold at all FYE and Suncoast retailers in the US. The official Cloverfield movie website has confirmed this information.

The Special Features will be:

1. Commentary by Director Matt Reeves
2. Case Designate: Cloverfield (50 mins)
3. Easter Eggs
4. Document 01.18.08: The Making of Cloverfield
5. Cloverfield Visual Effects
6. I Saw It! It's Alive! It's Huge!
7. Clover Fun
8. Deleted Scenes with Optional Commentary
9. Alternate Endings with Optional Commentary

Amazon.com already has a link to pre-order the Cloverfield DVD. It only has the normal one disc version.

Sequel

At the premiere of the film, Matt Reeves talked about possibilities on how a sequel will turn out if the film succeeds. According to Reeves, "While we were on set making the film we talked about the possibilities and directions of how a sequel can go. The fun of this movie was that it might not have been the only movie being made that night, there might be another movie! In today’s day and age of people filming their lives on their camera phones and Handycams, uploading it to YouTube… That was kind of exciting thinking about that."

In another interview, Reeves states:

There's a moment on the Brooklyn Bridge, and there was a guy filming something on the side of the bridge, and Hud sees him filming and he turns over and he sees the ship that's been capsized and sees the headless Statue of Liberty, and then he turns back and this guy's briefly filming him. In my mind that was two movies intersecting for a brief moment, and I thought there was something interesting in the idea that this incident happened and there are so many different points of view, and there are several different movies at least happening that evening and we just saw one piece of another.

Reeves also points out that the end scene on Coney Island shows something falling into the ocean in the background, but didn't give out details. Producers Bryan Burk and J. J. Abrams also announces their thoughts to Entertainment Weekly about possible sequel(s). According to Bryan Burk, "The creative team has fleshed out an entire backstory which, if we're lucky, we might get to explore in future films."

Also Abrams states that he does not want to rush into the development of the sequel right away because of the first film's success, instead he wants to create a sequel that is true to the previous film.

At the end of January, Matt Reeves entered early talks with Paramount Pictures to direct a sequel to Cloverfield, which would likely be filmed before Reeves's other project, The Invisible Woman. Reeves now said:

The idea of doing something so differently is exhilarating. We hope that it created a movie experience that is different. The thing about doing a sequel is that I think we all really feel protective of that experience. The key here will be if we can find something that is compelling enough and that is different enough for us to do, then it will probably be worth doing. Obviously it also depends on how [Cloverfield] does worldwide and all of those things too, but really, for us creatively, we just want to find something that would be another challenge.

Paramount announced that Matt Reeves would return as director for the sequel, Drew Goddard would return as writer, and J.J. Abrams would once again produce. The release date is 2009.

Video game

While a licensed game is reportedly in development, no official announcement of a game or a release date has been made by Paramount. A free fan-created game was announced in February of 2008 on the website cloverfieldgame.com, along with several videos of early concept graphics on YouTube. Brad Johnson, one of the game's developers, has said that he was contacted by Paramount's law offices about the game on March 14th, 2008. The company, while supportive of the fan's efforts, requested the web domain as they are currently developing an official game. According to Johnson, he relinquished the domain and opened a new one at grayshotgame.com. The title of the game has been changed to Grayshot and it will involve a new monster different from that in the film.

External links

• Official site (requires Adobe Flash Player)
• Template:Ja icon Cloverfield/Kishin
• Cloverfield at IMDb
• Cloverfield at AllMovie
• Cloverfield at Rotten Tomatoes
• Cloverfield at Metacritic
• Cloverfield at Box Office Mojo
• Slusho.jp
• Tagruato.jp
• Tidowave.com

Template:Box Office Leaders USA