Cloverfield
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Cloverfield |
| Original title | Cloverfield |
 | |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2008 |
| length | 81 minutes |
| Age rating |
FSK 12 JMK 14 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Matt Reeves |
| script | Drew Goddard |
| production |
JJ Abrams , Bryan Burk |
| music | Michael Giacchino |
| camera | Michael Bonvillain |
| cut | Kevin Stitt |
| occupation | |
| |
| chronology | |
|
Successor → |
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Cloverfield ( English for Kleefeld ) is a feature film produced by JJ Abrams that was released in Germany on January 31, 2008. Directed by Matt Reeves and written by Drew Goddard . Paramount Pictures and JJ Abrams ran a viral campaign for the film since mid-August 2007 . Cloverfield told in the found-footage style of the attack of a giant monster in New York City .
action
The film describes an episodic dystopia . It starts when a video camera is turned on by the US Department of Defense . The text on the screen indicates that the camera was found in area US447 , formerly known as Central Park .
The actual plot is preceded by a short sequence: Rob Hawkins films New York City out of the window at dawn. It is in the apartment of his best friend Beth's father. The two have planned to spend the afternoon on New York's amusement peninsula, Coney Island . Although Rob and Beth are only referred to as good friends, they seem to have spent a night of love together. The viewer perceives the entire film from the perspective of the camera Rob Hawkins used at the beginning of the film.
After a leap in time, Jason Hawkins and his girlfriend Lily appear, who have planned a farewell party for Jason's brother Rob in New York. Lily asks Jason to supervise the camera that evening and to record a goodbye message for Rob from every guest. Jason leaves the camera to his friend Hud, who then takes all the pictures. It becomes clear that Rob has since taken a job in Japan and will be leaving New York in the following days.
Beth shows up late at the party with her new boyfriend Travis, and an argument breaks out between her and Rob, whereupon she leaves the party angrily. A power outage and tremors ensue, and television reports of earthquakes in the New York area. There is also talk of an oil tanker that is said to have overturned off the coast near the Statue of Liberty. Most of the party goers and other house residents then go to the roof to get a better view of what is happening. There is a huge explosion near downtown Manhattan, and visitors panicked and flee the streets.
When the head of the Statue of Liberty hits next to them with strange scratches, it becomes clear that it is something other than an earthquake or a terrorist attack. Rob, Jason, Lily, Hud and Marlena flee to a small shop in front of the collapsing Woolworth Building . There they decide to leave New York over the Brooklyn Bridge . On the way out, Rob receives a call from Beth, who is trapped in her house and can no longer move. Rob pauses, and Jason is killed by a giant monster who tries to climb higher to get a better view of the area and destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, cutting off the main escape route from Manhattan .
Rob, Lily, Hud and Marlena run into the nearest electronics store, where Rob gets a new battery for his cell phone. On television sets exhibited there, they see the monster attacking New York City and destroying parts of Manhattan. The military is now deployed everywhere and tries, without success, to destroy the monster. In addition, the people are attacked by small monsters that seem to fall out of the big monster.
The protagonists escape the fighting on the streets in a subway station . Rob decides to go to Beth's house through the subway tunnels and shafts to rescue her. On the way, however, they are attacked by oversized crab monsters who seriously injure Marlena. They can save themselves to a small room where they decide to hit the streets again.
A short time later, they are picked up by the military, which takes them to a first aid camp for the injured and survivors. When it became known there that Marlena had been bitten, paramedics brought the young woman into quarantine in a panic . There Marlena's body suddenly puffs up and bursts. Then Rob, Lily and Hud make the decision to save Beth. A soldier advises them to go to a helipad by six o'clock, from which the city will be evacuated; this is her last chance to leave Manhattan. The situation is so out of control that the government is considering destroying all of Manhattan.
The survivors then go to Beth's badly damaged apartment building. They free Beth after minor incidents and reach the helipad. Lily is the first to leave the scene. Hud, Beth and Rob sit in the next helicopter and watch from the air as the monster is apparently killed by bombs from a B-2 bomber . But the monster jumps out of the smoke again, causing the helicopter to crash. Hud, Rob and Beth survive the impact and try to get to safety, with Hud running back to the crash site to get the camera. Hud is bitten in two by the monster that suddenly stands behind him and spat out again. Rob runs back and takes the camera before he and Beth take shelter under a bridge in Central Park called Greyshot Arch. While both are taping a message for posterity, more bombs explode and the bridge collapses over both of them.
The recording is interrupted, followed by an older recording with Rob and Beth on Coney Island , a month before the attacks. When the camera pans over the sea, in the right third of the picture a distant impact of an object falling from the sky into the sea can be seen.
At the end of the credits a voice speaks softly “Help us”. If this scene is played backwards, it results in "It's still alive", which refers to the monster that is still alive.
background
production
The idea of making a monster film came to JJ Abrams while traveling to Japan. He visited Japanese toy stores with his son and when looking at Godzilla models he decided to create an original “American” monster.
The making of the film was characterized by absolute secrecy. In February 2007, Paramount Pictures secretly approved the "Cloverfield" project for JJ Abrams' production company Bad Robot Productions . The casting process was also kept secret, the candidates did not receive the script or any other information about the film. At first it wasn't even known what title the film should have. In the first teaser for the film, only the date “18. January 2008 ”to see what turned out to be the premiere date. Since no other title was announced until the second trailer, this date was considered a temporary title, in US-American order with hyphens "1-18-08".
With a budget of 30 million US dollars, filming began in the summer of 2007 in New York (under the working title Cheese ) and Los Angeles (under the name Slusho ), where it was shot after just 34 days. When the first trailer was shown in American cinemas before Transformers , its copies appeared on the video portal YouTube . Paramount responded with complaints about the copyright infringement and asked YouTube to delete these video clips.
The first real movie trailer was shown four months later, on November 15, 2007, before the movie The Legend of Beowulf .
Marketing Campaign
Not only the secrecy on the part of Paramount and JJ Abrams helped the film to a media hype, but also the viral marketing campaign. Abrams already used this means to bridge the time between two seasons of the television series Lost . Experience has shown how quickly the online communities respond with their own theories and research and thus do a lot of advertising for the film without intending to. Abrams' production company also took advantage of these funds and opened various websites that were gradually discovered by fans. In MySpace profiles of the main characters of the film were opened, so that the fans always in direct contact and exchange with these fictional characters were, it was among other things an interactive comic book story written with the fans (on the profile page of Hudson Platt). In addition, several international fictional news programs about the events of the ARG were produced and distributed via YouTube and other video portals . In addition, websites of the fictional Japanese companies Slusho and Tagruato appearing in the film were created.
In Japan , a manga in four chapters with the title Cloverfield / Kishin ( ク ロ ー バ ー フ ィ ー ル ド / KISHIN, Kurōbāfīrudo / KISHIN ) was published by Kadokawa Shoten as part of the marketing campaign until April 2008 .
Others
- Cloverfield was originally intended only as a code name for the film. The code name comes from Cloverfield Boulevard in St. Monica, California, where JJ Abrams' production company Bad Robot was based at the time the film was made. The boulevard itself is named after "Clover Field", the original name of the Santa Monica airport , itself named after World War I pilot Greayer "Grubby" Clover.
- In the film, "Cloverfield" is said to be a mysterious-sounding, fictional military code name for incidents of the kind that can be seen in the film.
- Compared to similar films, the monster is rarely seen, and when it is, it is only briefly in the picture.
- The movie starts at the same time it ends: 6:42 a.m.
- The first scene in the film was recorded on April 27th - director Matt Reeves' birthday. In addition, this scene is the last that was shot for this film.
- Director Matt Reeves began negotiating the film's sequel with Paramount Pictures in January 2008.
- In the South Park series, Pandemic, the hand-held camera style is imitated, as are the sounds of the monster.
- The filmmakers used "pixel errors" at various points to hide homages to old film classics. If you look closely, you will discover images from well-known horror films in individual frames: 1. As soon as the camera rewinds to an old video from Beth, a picture of a giant ant can be seen for one frame - from the film Formicula (1954). 2. Later, a picture of a dinosaur from the film Panic in New York (1953) appears in a frame . 3. Towards the end of the film, after the monster crashed the helicopter, a frame from King Kong and the White Woman (1933) can be seen. The shot from the famous film shows the giant monkey King Kong standing on top of the Empire State Building and lashing out at an attacking double-decker - a clear reference to the crash scene in Cloverfield.
- The consistently shaky camera work makes some viewers of the film nausea.
synchronization
The German synchronization was for a dialogue book and the dialogue director of Björn Schalla commissioned by the Berliner Synchron AG Wenzel Lüdecke , Berlin .
| Role name | actor | Voice actor |
|---|---|---|
| Robert "Rob" Hawkins | Michael Stahl-David | Björn Schalla |
| Elizabeth "Beth" McIntyre | Odette Annable | Sarah Riedel |
| Hudson "Hud" Platt | TJ Miller | Dennis Schmidt-Foss |
| Marlena Diamond | Lizzy Caplan | Maria Koschny |
| Lily Ford | Jessica Lucas | Ghadah Al-Akel |
| Jason "JJ" Hawkins | Mike Vogel | Tommy Morgenstern |
reception
Financial success
Cloverfield was shown in 3,411 theaters on January 18, 2008 and grossed approximately $ 16 million in US and Canadian theaters on the day of its premiere. The following weekend, sales rose to $ 41 million, making the film the most successful film release in January (January is considered one of the lowest-revenue months for a film premiere in the film industry). Cloverfield grossed approximately $ 170.5 million worldwide by July 2008. The film opened in German cinemas on January 31, 2008.
Reviews
Todd McCarthy from the industry journal Variety calls Cloverfield "an old-fashioned monster film, which is dressed up with modern themes", he praised the special effects , a " nihilistic attitude" and the "dealing with the fears of 9/11 ". Ultimately, however, it differs little from monster films that “we have seen so far”.
Scott Foundas of LA Weekly criticizes the allusions to September 11, 2001 and calls the film "cheap and opportunistic ". In his opinion, the attempts of the film to be a socially critical examination of reality appear in an unfavorable light when compared with the works of Don Siegel , George A. Romero and Steven Spielberg : “Where these filmmakers all have something significant about the State of the world and especially about human nature, Abrams has little to say about anything "( " where those filmmakers all had something meaningful to say about the state of the world and, moreover, about human nature, Abrams doesn 't have much to say about anything " ).
Michael Rechtsshaffen from the Hollywood Reporter praises the effects and the “ claustrophobic intensity” of the film. He writes that although the characters themselves are "uninteresting and not developed", the film has "something refreshingly new in terms of monster films" because "it does not meet the usual expectations".
Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum describes the film as a "stealthy subversive, stylistically intelligent gem". Although the characters are "flat simpletons in their late twenties" and the portrayal work is "accordingly not worth mentioning", the idea of telling the story through amateur recordings is "great".
Michael Althen from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung compares the marketing with the film itself and comes to the conclusion that the film is "not half as smart ... as it comes along", but on the other hand it is more interesting than the hype had suggested. At the same time he criticizes the script's own conceptual weakness of the camera work:
“What is actually a smart idea turns out to be a real obstacle because on the one hand the guy treats the camera like an idiot and rarely gets into the picture what he actually sees [...], and on the other hand he continues to shoot in moments in which every normal person would have dropped the thing long ago because he has other worries, for example running for his life. "
Sequels
On January 15, 2016, a first trailer for a sequel called 10 Cloverfield Lane was released, which hit US theaters on March 11, 2016. In February 2018, The Cloverfield Paradox, a prequel to the series that explains the origin of the monster, was released. This film did not appear in theaters but was released as a Netflix premiere. The short film Megan from 2018 belongs to 10 Cloverfield Lane and revolves around the character Megan Paulson, only mentioned there.
Web links
- German film website
- Cloverfield in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Clover Field at rotten tomatoes (English)
- Cloverfield at Metacritic (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Age rating for Cloverfield . Youth Media Commission .
- ↑ Movie release dates , Internet Movie Database , accessed November 26, 2007.
- ↑ http://www.centralparknyc.org/visit/things-to-see/south-end/greyshot-arch.html
- ↑ Cloverfield Monster: It's Still Alive? , 1-18-08.blogspot.com, accessed February 6, 2008.
- ↑ Kimberly Potts: Two Spocks for Star Trek! In: Movies.com. July 27, 2007, archived from the original on April 24, 2008 ; accessed on January 16, 2016 .
- ↑ a b c Working title for Cloverfield , Internet Movie Database , accessed November 17, 2007.
- ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from July 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ http://www.tagruato.jp/
- ↑ Kadokawa-Verlag: Announcement about the appearance of the manga Kishin .
- ↑ cloverfield boulevard st. monica - google search. Retrieved February 15, 2018 (de-US).
- ^ Cloverfield (2008). Retrieved February 15, 2018 .
- ↑ Greayer Clover . In: cloverfield.org . July 27, 2017 ( cloverfield.org [accessed February 15, 2018]).
- ↑ Scott Collura: Exclusive: Cloverfield Director Speaks! In: IGN. December 14, 2007; Retrieved February 15, 2018 (American English).
- ↑ "Paramount sows 'Cloverfield' sequel" ( Memento of the original from December 10, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Michael Fleming, Variety , January 30, 2008, accessed January 31, 2008.
- ↑ Screen Crush: Cloverfield Paradox: How All 3 Movies Are Connected. February 5, 2018, accessed February 7, 2018 .
- ↑ www.rp-online.de/kultur/film/geschichte/Ein-Film-der-Uebelkeit-und-Angst-ausloest_aid_527427.html ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ↑ German synchronous files. In: www.synchronkartei.de. Retrieved May 22, 2019 .
- ^ Cloverfield Film Review , Todd McCarthy, Variety , January 16, 2008, accessed January 18, 2007.
- ^ "Cloverfield Is a Horror," Scott Foundas, LA Weekly, January 16, 2008, accessed November 1, 2013 (local time).
- ^ Cloverfield film review ( January 15, 2009 memento in the Internet Archive ), Michael Rechtsshaffen, The Hollywood Reporter, January 17, 2008, accessed January 18, 2007.
- ↑ Cloverfield Film Review , Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly, January 16, 2008, accessed January 18, 2007.
- ↑ Bring me the head of the Statue of Liberty , FAZ , February 1, 2008, accessed on February 2, 2008.
- ↑ Cloverfield 2 - First poster for the mysterious sci-fi sequel. In: moviepilot . Retrieved January 15, 2016 .
- ↑ The Story Behind Netflix Releasing Cloverfield Paradox After The Super Bowl . In: CINEMABLEND . February 10, 2018 ( cinemablend.com [accessed February 15, 2018]).
