Background: This is the monster-movie being masterminded by producer J.J Abrams (Lost, MI:III), still veiled in secrecy after wowing audiences as a teaser before Transformers in the summer. The hype-machine has been running for months, with even the title kept under wraps (although the working title Cloverfield is now confirmed.)
The plot seems to be your standard giant monster trashes a city (New York, natch), with the twist being the Blair Witch-style filming technique, as a group of friends document the disaster on their camcorders...
The plot seems to be your standard giant monster trashes a city (New York, natch), with the twist being the Blair Witch-style filming technique, as a group of friends document the disaster on their camcorders...
Review: Unlike the teaser (which was an elongated scene), the trailer is a more traditional series of clips, but it's now clear the whole movie will be presented as home-video footage -- helping to sell the reality of the situation...
Cloverfield seems to be Godzilla, with a 28 Days Later digital grittiness and Blair Witch Project sensibility. His involvement with Lost means J.J Abrams certainly knows a thing or two about building hype, and keeping stuff elusive. Considering Cloverfield is released quite soon (18 Jan 08, in the US / 1 Feb 08 in the UK), the production has been impressively water-tight when it comes to spoilers.
Prediction: There's no doubt that the marketing campaign has built enough expectation and interest to mean a massive opening weekend. Abrams himself has a following from the hordes of Alias and Lost fans -- while everyone loves a big monster action movie spectacle, don't they?
But it's the realism delivered by filming everything on hand-held cameras that will be Cloverfield's trump card. That style caused a phenomenon with Blair Witch in 1999 and, although Cloverfield s reality is less blurred than that seminal horror, audiences love the sense of realism camcorders bring to unreal events.
The first blockbuster of 2008 is upon us...
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