HC will be down for a few days starting sometime this weekend, I think, as the mighty mighty Whiterose empire that hosts us relocates.
But, mostly, the Cloverfield trailer is out.
The only reason I bring it up is that the trailer gives the impression that the movie is the Godzilla equivalent of Astro City. That is, it's not a monster movie. It's a movie about how ordinary people cope when living in a giant monster movie.
It's an interesting approach to the story. It's also a Fourth Age (Iron, I guess) story, in that it requires the audience to be completely familiar with the traditional form of the genre, in order that it can view the form from a new perspective.
It's the same phenomenon in effect as I talked about earlier, when you kill a significant character off-screen in order to show something else on-screen. It's a statement that the core story types of the genre are so moribund that you're not going to try to tell a new story with them, that the only thing you can think of to do in the genre is to try to find an altogether new angle.
This is, I think, an inherently limiting process, like when a star that's running out of hydrogen and helium fuel starts burning carbon, oxygen, and silicon in a desperate attempt to keep the furnace burning a bit longer. There are only so many ways to approach a genre story without leaving the genre behind.
From the artist's perspective, of course, it's not that he's unwilling or unable to do a genre story in traditional form, it's that he's got this nifty new idea for looking at the genre. Which is fine, and certainly new ways of looking at a genre are worthwhile, but they are not substitutes for the actual core of the genre. You can't have Cloverfield unless there are also Godzilla movies to tell the audience what to expect from the genre; you can't have Dark Knight Returns without Batman stories in which he's the World's Greatest Detective and the protector of Gotham against a grotesque and menacing gallery of rogues.
Posted by Greg at November 23, 2007 12:50 AM
So I am assuming you are saying we as audience members are ready for this movie because there are a TON of Godzilla or Godzilla-like movies out there. Toho alone has cornered the market but there are plenty of "world gone mad" scenarios out there where cities are destroyed by Something Bigger Than Man Was Meant To Understand. I think the monster movie genre, as venerable as it is (King Kong kicked it off in the early 20th Century, for example,) is ripe for this treatment. And the new trailer clearly gives us SOME view of the big bad (even if only a glimpse). But most Godzilla like movies are shot from the air to see this giant creature's view of the city, namely a toy box of teeny tiny cars and tanks. It will be fun, for once, to really see it from the ground's eye view only.
My only worry is the skakey-cam. I enjoyed Blair Witch for what is was but I am one of those folks who get queasy watching too much camera work like that. It isn't bad when people are running and stuff but it is the slow-weave of the camera in "quiet" moments that get me sick.
More or less, that's what I'm saying.
What I'm concerned about is, I think, more a problem in the superhero world than it is in the movie world, and that's that when all you have in the creator's box is fans, people like Quentin Tarantino and Geoff Johns, with encyclopedic knowledge of the genre, you've got genre ennui. The creators are so bored with the standard way of doing things that the only thing they can do is try to find something new.
That distorts the genre. It means that the only examples of the genre out there are either not representative of the genre, or are accessible only to other experts in the genre. Both of those cut off the flow of new audience into the genre.
This is mostly an argument by assertion at this point; I'll have to work on it some more to build it into a working theory.
I think this is a smaller trend than you're making it out to be. Busiek, Gail Simone, Jeff Parker, Bedard, Dixon, at least when working on company properties instead of their own creations, usually write very straightforward, non postmodern superhero stories.
As for Cloverfield and Tarantino, they are by far the exceptions. Tarantino may have inspired a generation of imitators, but most action films are still stuff like Die Hard, Hitman, American Gangster, whatever. Across the board everything may be more violent, but I don't think the basic genre structure is in any danger.
It's all gonna hang on the payoff. Even in a traditional kaiju movie, most of the time the camera is on the squishies anyway, with the monster making a few dramatic appearances here and here prior to the finale, which is All Monster All The Time.
If Cloverfield ends with cuts between various viewpoint characters positioned in such a way as to get a good view of the Big Damn Final Battle, so we see plenty of the monster in the fifth act, it'll just be a different way of running the standard kaiju film. It'll only really be genre ennui if we never get more than occasional glimpses of the monster, and the defeat/driving-away happens off screen.
DVD:
That's what I think we're going to get. In a monster movie, the story is the monster attacking and then defeating the monster. I think Abrams is saying, that's not the story. The story is these people over here; Abrams is setting it inside a giant monster story, but the giant monster is not the story.
Like Terminator 2 is not a time travel movie. There's time travel in it, but the time travel and its accompanying genre points like paradoxes and history-changing are orthogonal to the story that Cameron is actually doing.
Or Signs, which is set inside an alien invasion story, but which doesn't care at all about the alien invasion; the story it's telling is about this ex-preacher and his faith.
Of course, I could be wrong. Abrams could just be answering the Devlin/Emmerlich Godzilla with a giant monster movie that doesn't suck like an ultra high vacuum, and the trailer could just be stage-setting showing us an example of normal everyday life thrown into complete chaos by ohmigod a giant monster is attacking.
Actually, now that I've seen some of the "viral marketing" clips, Cloverfield isn't Astro City. It's Signs.