July 12, 2007
What was that?
Well, my last post was about my trip to see the new Transformers movie; what I left out, was the bizarre very creepy trailer for a mysterious upcoming disaster/horror/survival flick that left me confused and very intrigued, and with no idea what it was even named!
From watching it, what I knew for sure was: It's either shot with a personal camcorder, or adjusted to appear as such (which is what I suspect) and that it had pretty amazing special effects. As far as plot and story, it involves a creature of some sort wrecking unbelievable heck on NYC; to include, massive explosions, flaming debris, and ending with the head of the statue of liberty crashing down into the street. The questions is, what's going on? And, is their a Godzilla-like creature involved?
Naturally when I got home from Transformers I had to investigate for several hours about what this mysterious movie trailer was. The only things I knew for sure was it was a disaster film, by JJ Abrams, and there was a movie production company by the name of “Bad Robot” involved.
After some long and hard searching I began to gather more clues about this movie, and I've discovered some very interesting pieces of information. (Most importantly, that I have succumbing to a very elaborately planned form of viral movie marketing unlike anything before. And it's working, there are forums and user-generated videos exploding all over the net. Apparently, I'm not the only one confused and intrigued.) So I thought I'd try to share some of the information I've compiled about this upcoming thriller...
At first, I tried to locate a copy of the trailer on YouTube, but everywhere I looked I got that all to familiar message that it had been removed because of copyright restrictions, and so forth. (Which seems a little odd since it's a trailer, not actually a film that comes with a “don't copy this” message, and nobody even knows what it's even called!) This aggressive removal of the trailer by Viacom only made me want to see the trailer MORE! I felt very clever after I found a page that had, at the time, the best available copy of the trailer somebody had recorded with their cell phone. However, that's all irrelevant now as a much better official version of the trailer (available in High Definition) is up on Apple Trailers.
After more digging, on IMDb forums, and various other movie forum pages, I discovered the film currently has at least 3 “code names” but no actual name. It goes by 1-18-08 (the release date of the film), as well as, “Cloverfield” and “Slusho”. There is also possibly “The Parasite.” On IMDB it's the Unnamed JJ Abrams Project.
As I kept digging I found this guys YouTube clips that offer some absurdly in-depth analysis of the trailer and related materials. I can't believe the level of detail he's put into researching this mysterious trailer. Apparently the trailer is rich with potential clues as to an explanation of what this movie really is about. And he's funny too, hey wait a minute!...Maybe he's part of this viral marketing conspiracy? (Well, consciously or not, I guess anyone reading any of this is.)
Oh, and in a couple places (IMDb forums and such) it seems to be popular for people to link to this specific part of a page on Wikipedia about a Jappanese horror flick in the same vein as Godzilla.
Apparently, there is only one “official” page for the movie, which is here. If you go there you'll see two photographs that relate to the film that you cam move around. Listen to NightOwl3090's analysis about the picture of the women.
But I found a couple other really helpful pages, including this one that gives information about the cast, these other two potentially related websites.
Wow, up until the release of Transformers, nobody knew anything about this film. This movie already is amazing, just with respect to the elaborate nature of all of this viral marketing. The less I know, the more curious I am.
As a final note: I consulted a friend who was an English major and he instantly had a clue as to what this movie MIGHT be about that I think no one else on the various forums has figured out yet. The trailer reminded him of a famous poem by the Irish poet WB Yeats, about a Lion monster. Check it out. However, that guess is somewhat influenced by the fact I thought the guy on the street was saying “It's a Lion, it's Huge” when it turns out, according to the analysis by nightbowl3090, it's really “It's Alive, It's huge.” But, who knows, that poem might still be related.
I suspect that it won't be just another Godzilla movie, but from the looks of it, will be more like a documentary about what would happen if Godzilla got hammered on Redbull and Vodka. Whatever this film's about, it's likely to be effectively scary/thrilling and huge in the box-office.
Labels: 1-18-08
