bloodyrosemccoy | Where's Optimus When You Need Him? (Reply)

The funny thing about Cloverfield to me is that it’s got this very reality vibe, and everything about it seems to be an attempt to give it verisimilitude—no clever one-liners, no real In Charge people, limited monster money shots, home camera quality, no exposition—and yet it follows almost every single monster movie convention, except for two (discussed below), so if they had just one genre-savvy person around they could have warned our “heroes”* about some important things we all should know when facing giant city-destroying monsters:

First rule of monster movies: go away from the destruction. I would never make a good hero. If I got a voicemail saying that my entire family was trapped in a building at Ground Zero with a busload of orphans and kittens, I would feel very bad about that for the rest of my life. But that life would be long.
If there are tiny things swarming about the monster, don’t inspect them. This was actually the part where the movie got pushed into a positive position on my Rockometer: when the news people were talking about how something seemed to be falling off of the monster, and a split second before they knew what was going on you were thinking, “That will not end well.”
When all the rats are running in one direction, FOLLOW THEIR ASSES. Rats are survivors. They know when to run.
You’re somewhere dark; you hear a noise. Someone suggests you turn on the night vision or fumbles for a match or a flashlight or is about to turn the power back on. Make sure to be ready, since once that sudden illumination occurs you’re going to have less than half a second to react to the fact that Something Awful is about four inches from one of your vulnerable spots.
If you get bitten by anything unusual and get away, you are toast. TOAST, I say. Leaving aside that animal bites generally have a lot of bacteria, monster bites generally also carry the inevitability of a horrible death involving one or more of the following: blood, guts, mutation, explosion. We all know this. The film did not even try to surprise us. Someone got bit; she was toast. She felt conspicuously dizzy and looked conspicuously pale. This is not because she had lost some blood or had been shocked, it is because she was toast. Then we get to the quarantine tent and they wheel John Hurt past going, “Yeah, another bite,” and everyone in the theater is going, “MAYBE SOMEONE SHOULD CHECK ON TOASTY MCDOOMEDONTOAST.” And then she admits that she doesn’t feel so good, and we all go, “Imagine that. Good-bye.”
Vehicle crashes, however, are no problem to overcome at all.
If you find yourself at the focus of the movie, realize that monsters are ubiquitous. Or, possibly, they can smell and track main characters, even in unconventional movies. Because one monster can apparently be everywhere a main character goes, even though New York is purportedly a rather big city.
Watch out for enormous feet.

The two conventions that were not followed were:

Long pointless exposition about the monster’s origin. Leaves me free to speculate. (“Wait, are they being ravaged by a 30-story fruit bat?! With fleas?!” There was also a long discussion among us nerds about how the giant space fleas probably do to the monster what they do to the people, only the monster’s quite a bit bigger and its only symptoms are burst boils or something.)
The movie ending with the monster’s death, or at least presumed death. For all we know, it’s still destroying New York.

I think what I loved most about this movie—aside from the fact that it was a scaryass monster and the effects were awesome—was how it messed with these conventions. You never expect to see giant space fleas or crawling eyeballs** on home video, but once you do you can extrapolate a helluva lot if you’ve seen any others.

Also, for the record, HAY YOU GUYZ THIS MOVIE IS AWESOME! I didn’t expect it to be, but it is.

*Although the other thing about this movie is that these people were not really heroes, but just people.

**Was this in the film? You don’t know!