Stop right there! If you have not yet seen the movie Cloverfield and you are planning such a weekend outing, read no further. I am about to review the movie and my review will give things away. Actually, it’s less of a review and more of a moral commentary on the nature of contemporary film marketing. Be that as it may, I have no desire to ruin your cinematic experience, the way two bratty little kids ruined mine back in the late sixties as I watched the original Planet of the Apes. The punch line, of course, was that three astronauts thought they were on a planet billions of light years away from Earth. It turned out they had really been on Earth in the far future. They had been home the whole time and this was not revealed until the very end of the movie. That is, it was supposed to be revealed at the end. In my case, it was revealed at the very beginning of the movie. One of the delinquents sitting in front of me had seen the movie before, so he gleefully announced to his friend (in full, stereophonic lungs that carried over the entire theater) where the astronauts really were during the first five minutes of the movie. ( Oh. Some of you readers have never seen Planet of the Apes either? Sorry.)
Anyway, I said this article was mostly about film marketing. The problem with Cloverfield was not in the movie itself, but the preview of the movie. Let me explain: I hate the way they preview movies today. And when I say that I hate it, what I mean is, I REALLY HATE ! I hate it with a passion! They give the audience no benefit for intelligence and they show almost every crucial scene in chronological order. They assume people are so stupid that if they don’t already know the entire story, they can’t decide ahead of time whether or not to buy a ticket. There are many movies I’ve never seen but I feel like I’ve seen them because I saw the previews. Once, when my daughter returned home after going to the movies with her friends to sample, While You Were Sleeping, I tried an experiment:
“Now don’t tell me,” I said. “Let me see if I can relay the entire story and remember, I’ve seen only the preview.”
Well, I was right on the money but I do not boast. Anyone else could have done the same. All they would have had to do was show up early before the feature presentation and watch 5 shrunken films called “previews.” Now, mind you, these light romantic comedies have such simpleton, pea brain plots, that even without a chronological crystal ball style, foreshadow, we could still guess the ending. How many times have we seen someone chase their lover on the way to the airport, confess their feelings in front of a crowd of spectators and then kiss while everyone claps? That’s the Hollywood of today. If an ending works, recycle it a hundred more times. The fact that we see the predictable ending spelled out in a preview before we even get a chance to watch the stupid picture, makes the phenomenon even more ironic.
It’s even sadder with the occasional creative movie. I remember back in the eighties, when this type of give away preview first hit the market. I watched the trailers for two very original films, each with creative twist endings; the Science Fiction, Enemy Mine and the court thriller, Jagged Edge. These previews gave everything away. What could have been a fun theater experience was completely ruined.
Alfred Hitchcock knew how to preview a motion picture. When you were done watching one of his trailers, you knew absolutely nothing about the story but you couldn’t wait to see it. In fact you were desperate to see it. Hitchcock came from a different time and a different breed of film makers.
Not that we don’t have some promising artists today. J.J. Abrams is also a great director. Who knows? He may even be an embryonic Hitchcock. Time will tell. His episodic television series, Lost is just about the finest drama ever to grace the tube. Cloverfield was no less creative and innovative. Chances are, Abrams himself had nothing to do with the way the movie was marketed and it may be unfair to hold a bad preview against a good movie. Nevertheless, studios have to take responsibility for their products and that includes the advertising.
What was wrong with the preview? At first, seemingly nothing. In some ways it reminded me of Hitchcock. Something was destroying New York City, something powerful enough to knock the head off of the Statue of Liberty. The last line of the preview showed a college age guy talking into his cell phone camera, “If you’re watching this video you know more about what’s going on than we do.”
“Now that’s a great preview,” I said to myself.
So what’s the problem? The problem is this trailer turned out to be the biggest cheat of all. At the end of the movie, you still knew nothing about what was going on. In fact, the last words of the movie were the last words of the preview, that same college kid telling us he didn’t know what was going on. Oh sure, we got a look or two at a monster but we had pretty much already figured that there was some kind of monster from the preview. Who was this monster? Where had it come from? The movie never told us.
Now, mind you, a movie with an open, interpretive ending may bother some but it doesn’t bother me. Again, my problem is not with the movie itself, only the preview. I love it when a film refuses to wrap everything up into a neat, tidy little package. They say one of the most enjoyable experiences about watching 2001 in theaters was standing around in the lobby afterwards, listening to people argue over what the movie was trying to say.
So what is the problem with Cloverfield? Namely this: Although the preview supposedly gave away nothing, it actually gave away everything. It was as bad as all the other trailers. Why? Because we saw a preview about some friends in New York whose party was interrupted suddenly by some scary creature attacking New York and then we anxiously awaited opening night only to see a whole movie which, when it ended, had revealed nothing that we didn’t already know. Maybe the twist of the film was that the ending was speculative but we saw a preview with that exact same twist. Even worse, the preview was also a cheat. It teased us and never delivered. The whole reason people flooded to the film itself was to find out what the preview promised we would find out. And yet we found out nothing. Again, that would have been a worthy novelty in its own rite. It’s just that this worthy novelty had already been there in the cliff notes.
This is Bob Siegel, making the obvious, obvious.
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