Back from Sydney

Got aback about 11:30pm, fed Pegasus and the cats.

Battlefield Earth , arguable one of the dumbest SF films ever made (stars John Travolta, based on a story by L. Ron Hubbarb) is starting at 12:40am. I think I'll tape it, have a bite to eat and go to bed.

Oh, and Cloverfield was a lot better than I expected, but I'll write about that tomorrow. Oh, but one of the trailers before it excited me:

Space, the final frontier...

...so I have to wait a year?

Cloverfield

OK, I saw Cloverfield last night.

First up, it's pretty clear from the trailer that this is a MONSTER flick. It's also clear from that trailer that part of the "gimmick" for this film is in not seeing that monster (or monsters) clearly. That being the case, I'm not going to reveal (even if I could) what it is here. Rather, I want to explain why I like the film.

First up, probably like everybody else, I've watched heaps of "monster destroys lots of stuff and kills many people and is then put down" films, like Godzilla, Gamera, Aliens vs Predator: Requiem  and so on. I also have a history of playing games about this, like The Creature that ate Sheyboygan, Crush Crumble and Chomp!, and Crush! I get into the scenario.

Trouble is that most of these films are now largely clichés, repeating variations on set pieces from previous films. In fact that was one of problems with Aliens vs Predator - you could predict mostly who was going to survive (male lead, brother and good girl), and who was going to be a victim (flirty girl, bullies, etc). The director of that film followed pre established methods of establishing a scene and then dropping a monster in it - you could tell something was going to happen by the music alone.

You tend not to get either in this film. Who survives and who doesn't is unpredictable, just as who the main characters are shifts during the film. The fiction behind this is that the whole film is an amateur video recording done by someone who was originally going to document a wedding. That means several things:

• no background music other than what's playing in the scene (radio/tv), so no audio cues to oncoming events;
• constant camera movements, refocus, and deliberate bad exposure, which looks very realistic (as do any special effects);
• cuts from one scene to another come from switching that camera off and on, which means that scene change comes about because the camera person thought it'd be interesting;
• the "cameraman" (who changes from time to time) is also a character in the film, and narration tends to be their comments on events (and the the responses from their companions), thus we start to fully identify with the characters in the situation - they are all flawed, all human .

Even though I knew this was all technique, it was very compelling and felt immersed in the situation. This is not a film like the 1998 Godzilla remake - where the audience sees multiple viewpoints - in this we see a single viewpoint - that of the camera, and everything seems much more personal because of that.

So, I liked the film. It scared the shit out of me, though I suspect that unlike Alien, I would find this a hard film to watch twice.

 

Also, and this was an odd thing - for most of the film I was intrigued about whether or not the character Lily Ford was played by Charisma Carpenter. In fact she was played by Jessica Lucas, but the resemblance (especially the voice) is uncanny.

Thoughts about Monster Films

The Japanese seemed to start this whole genre about giant monsters taking out entire cities, and it's no surprise why. They lost 500,000 in civilian lives in WWII (see the casualty list at wikipedia) and most of those would have been due to United States strategic bombing of Japan (note though, that this doesn't mean that they were "innocent" - China lost 16,200,000 civilian dead, and Japan invading would have been a big cause of this).

Godzilla

In any case, such experiences are about terror, misery and death, and the total inability to do much about it. In the original Godzilla Film, the monster is beaten off, but the threat of it's return (or of those like it) still remains (later films though, became ritual and farce). These films are very similar to Alien Invasion ones as well, especially the different versions of War of the Worlds: George Pal version, Spielberg version, and Independence Day. Creatures invade, humanity falls, and then is "miraculously" saved.

I suspect though, that films like Cloverfield and Aliens vs Predator are more reactions (finally!) to 9/11. There have been films already dealing with that subject (and most are very hard to watch, because we are still only 7 years distant from those events) but such monster films allow us to confront the fear and terror of unmitigated death, without the politics of real events getting in the way.

My guess is that we'll see a few more "Cloverfield" films on the way.

Dietician

I'm off to the dietician's in half an hour. Don't know if I've lost any weight, but I feel a little fitter/.\. While I'm there I'm going to arrange new appointments with my counsellor as well. I've been a bit "off the rails" of late, and talking to her helps a lot.