Netflix's ongoing impersonation of everybody

First Netflix wanted to be that distributor that released small indie movies that you wouldn't care about missing on the big screen, but were worth watching (I Don't Feel at Home in this World Anymore).

Then Netlfix got into the business of high-profile (partially) foreign language films by acclaimed foreign language directors, which probably should be seen on the big screen, but oh well (Okja).

Then Netflix thought they can/should be in the business of delivering big-budget blockbuster entertainment with major stars (Bright).

Now, they want to be that distributor that drops a movie by surprise, to capitalize on the type of buzzy viral phenomenon that was sort of launched by The Blair Witch Project and has become the bread and butter of the Cloverfield series (The Cloverfield Paradox).

Pick an identity and stick to it, Netflix.

Then again, Netflix flying out in all directions is nothing new, and has been discussed much before, both on this blog and by everybody else.

Netflix is operating under the -- well, I'm not going to say "misconception," because it may not be -- that any type of cinematic experience you could imagine yourself having can be recreated on the small screen. And if so, they should be the ones to do it.

At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix tried to make itself the exclusive home of one of the next Star Wars spinoffs, though I suppose Disney is actually ending its arrangement with Netflix in order to have their own streaming service, not considering deepening that relationship.

I don't have a lot more to say about this, but I did think it was worth noting. I also thought it was worth noting that the last two of these in particular, Bright and The Cloverfield Paradox, have felt a lot like failures in what they were trying to do. Then again, the business model of Netflix has always allowed the company to absorb failures. Any particular investment is such a small percentage of their overall portfolio that they'll hit with some other thing if this particular thing fails.

We finally saw The Cloverfield Project last night, and I say "finally" because it really does seem like pretty much everyone saw the movie at an earlier point of its first week of availability. I suppose this fact alone suggests that Netflix was successful in creating the type of event buzz that they wanted from this movie. I had to actively dodge discussion of the movie's qualities in various locations on social media, and ultimately couldn't, knowing the movie was supposed to be bad. So I carried in that preconception ... and had it resoundingly confirmed.

This movie is not good. In fact, it earned my first one-star rating of the young year on Letterboxd. It's poorly conceived and tonally scattershot, and what's more, it just doesn't look like a movie. It felt incredibly TV in its design and camerawork. (I was truly distracted by the handheld cinematography of Dan Mindel, with its little infinitesimal movements that were small enough for me to feel like they were not intentional, but large enough to make me feel subtly nauseous.) It's too bad too because some actors I really like are in this movie, particularly Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, Elizabeth Debecki and Chris O'Dowd, the latter of home is perhaps the embodiment of the movie's tonal confusion.

If you are one of those who hasn't seen it yet, I won't pick apart plot points here, because I don't necessarily expect a Cloverfield movie to stand up to heavy scrutiny. I will say that director Julius Onah has made such an inferior entry in the series that it feels like a step down from Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane by orders of magnitude. While those two are an all-time great in the found footage genre and a very clever thriller that is defined by its success at withholding information from us, Paradox feels kind of like a vomit of exposition, but bad exposition. The movie ends up withholding information from us out of clumsiness in the script rather than actual intent.

Two final, unrelated comments about the movie and/or Netflix before I close out.

We had a paradox of a different sort on our hands last night even trying to watch the movie. As you know if you've done many searches on Netflix, it has an uncanny ability to produce the movie you're looking for just by typing a single letter or two, probably because you're trying to watch one of their buzzed about products and the search algorithm is weighted toward those results. But this did not happen when we searched The Cloverfield Paradox. The original Cloverfield came up, but not its second sequel.

My first instinct was to curse Australia for somehow failing to negotiate the rights to one of Netflix's own bits of original content. I complain about how a lot of things in Australia seem to be done in this inscrutable, backwards way that defies logic, and Australian Netflix not carrying The Cloverfield Paradox would have been a perfect example of that.

I had just sent my wife, who had a computer nearby, to search whether the movie is not available in Australia when I had an idea about a different search to do. I started typing in "God Particle," the original title of the movie, and sure enough, when I got those first two letters in, The Cloverfield Paradox came up. Not God Particle, mind you -- The Cloverfield Paradox. We selected it and started watching straightaway.

I looked online to see if this was one of the "gimmicks" about a movie with a viral release strategy, that it was "hidden" and you had to know to search it under this secret other title in order to find it. But no, that did not seem to be the case, according to my friends in my Flickcharters Facebook group, who checked on the American Netflix just to be sure. It seems as though somebody in the Australian Netflix just failed to update the search algorithm when the title was changed -- and that would be the perfect example of Australian backwardness -- though it surprises me that something like that is even customized at the local level.

The other thing is that I noticed that Netflix has made a subtle change to how they bill some of their original content, specifically their movies -- in response to this post, I would like to think. In the trailer that gets thrust upon you just from landing on the home page, which in this case was for When We First Met, I noticed that they call it "A Netflix Film" rather than "A Netflix Original Film." The omission of that single word is significant -- perhaps an admission that this was not something that originated with them and should sully them by association, but rather, something that they picked up off the scrap heap in their ongoing content dump?

Netflix distancing themselves proactively from their own potential failures. Now they really do resemble every other distributor.

Days past, when a mind could still be blown

There are no more worlds left to conquer.

Maybe there never were. But it used to feel like there were.

In the eight years between Cloverfield and Cloverfield 2 -- and I'm not going to say if 10 Cloverfield Lane actually has anything to do with the original Cloverfield, because I'm going to avoid spoilers in this post -- something has been lost in our larger pop culture entertainment landscape. And that thing is the ability to really be surprised by something.

Both movies were released with little advanced hype and campaigns that emphasized the mystery of what they were or might be. Or rather, there were not six months of advanced hype, but the month or so of advanced hype we did get, when these movies were suddenly unveiled as impending releases, was intense. A buzz developed around these movies that made them cultural moments. Or at least, that was the case for Cloverfield in 2008. How successfully they recreated that with 10 Cloverfield Lane is a little unclear to me because I've had a busy couple months, and have had my head in the cinematic sand in terms of new releases.

Cloverfield converted on the hype. The mystery of what we weren't seeing in the teaser trailers was exquisite, and exquisitely realized in the final film.

10 Cloverfield Lane didn't convert, at least not for me, at least not to this extent. It could just be that I'm older and less susceptible to this type of thing, but more likely is that we're all a bit more jaded than we were eight years ago.

I blame Lost.

Lost was contemporaneous with Cloverfield, but its most mind-blowing suppositions actually predated Matt Reeves' movie. I think it was in the spring of 2005 that we first learned of the existence of "the hatch." After that, the big question on everyone's lips was "What's in the hatch? What's in the hatch? WHAT'S IN THE HATCH???"

Although it did not seem like the response could possibly be satisfying, it was. At least for a couple seasons. Whether you remained satisfied with what was in the hatch, or any of the many outlandish twists and turns the Lost story took, was more specific to the individual. But at first we were all primed and excited by this, and suddenly, we wanted every entertainment option that existed to make us question what was in its version of "the hatch."

So they all tried to do that. All of them.

It was not yet inescapable by 2008, even if it started (on TV, anyway) a couple years before that. Cloverfield had its hatch, and that hatch was a Godzilla-style lizard captured through the lens of a single video camera. It also had military cover-ups, redacted information on confidential documents, Easter Eggs, and everything else an enterprising sleuth could want.

10 Cloverfield Lane has a hatch -- literally. That's not really a spoiler. Even the poster above gives that much away. The trailers also pretty much show that we are in an underground bunker. We don't want to know what's in the hatch, but rather, what's outside of it.

But hatches have been dropped like a hot potato. Have you ever noticed that you may have ate, drank, slept, and dreamt Lost up until that finale, but two weeks later, you never actually thought about it again? Lost itself was dropped like a hot potato. As quickly as it collectively swept us up in its spell, it deposited us back out again (kind of like a smoke monster, disappearing into the ephemera). Nowadays, people seem to forget Lost was even a thing, and it ended not even six years ago.

It's not that we've stopped craving the type of surprises Lost and Cloverfield could deliver, the kind that gave them a reason for existing in the first place. It's that the bar has been raised to impossibly high levels. In the latter half of the aughts, television writers and screenwriters were given free rein to imagine the most out-there scenarios they could possibly concoct, as everyone was desperate to be "the next Lost." Eventually, though, we reached a saturation point. Now instead of looking for "the next Lost," we could probably pick back through to sometime in 2014, when something was probably "the last Lost." At least until people start becoming interested in hatches again, maybe in the early 2020s.

So let's get back to 10 Cloverfield Lane. It's a good movie that is made really compellingly in parts. But it doesn't grab us like Cloverfield did, because probably nothing can do that these days. Everyone has already imagined the most outlandish possible thing that could be on the other side of that hatch door. When it ends up being among the first half-dozen things we would guess, we aren't impressed.

But maybe it's just me. Maybe I've become a cynical old bastard. Maybe the teenager who was too young to see Cloverfield will have his or her mind blown by 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Or maybe today's writers just need to find new ways to conquer those worlds.

I finally saw: [REC]

In the fall of 2008 I saw and loved Quarantine, which made 2008 kind of a watershed year in terms of imaginative new ways to use found footage. That's because Cloverfield kicked off 2008. That movie blew my mind enough that I saw it twice in the theater and ended up ranking it in my top ten for the year.

Of course, both of those films were indebted to the Spanish horror film [REC] from 2007 -- one minorly, one majorly in the sense that it was actually a remake of [REC].

As sometimes happens, though, I never circled back to watch [REC], perhaps because I worried that by having seen its remake, Quarantine, I didn't expect much about it to surprise me. So even though I figured it was probably the superior film, I didn't make the time for it until last night.

Even last night, though, I carried in the same concerns. It's that worry you get about feeling like you cannot properly assess the quality of something whose tricks you have already seen copied ad infinitum. We live in an era in which the found footage horror has gotten pretty devalued, and even though I have been pleasantly surprised by more recent entries than I have disliked, it's still a genre with a lot of baggage. Even one of the granddaddies of that genre felt like it might not offer anything fresh, through no fault of its own.

But [REC] is only just over 75 minutes long, so committing to finally seeing it was ultimately a pretty easy decision.

And I'm certainly glad I did.

Although it's true that I was not surprised by any of the developments in the movie, Quarantine having copied those developments pretty much exactly (even down to using most of the same shots), I was glad to see that I was able to let my critical mind go free, and put myself in the shoes of audiences who saw this for the first time nine years ago. At the time, it had been eight years since The Blair Witch Project put found footage on the map, and the genre had yet to be used in a truly interesting way since then. It was easy for me to imagine last night the thrill of seeing something like [REC] roll off the screen at me, even if I wasn't experiencing those thrills with quite the same sense of freshness as those audiences did.

The trouble was how to provide this movie a star rating.

The experience I had watching it was probably a four. I can't deny that knowing how things were going to turn out dissipated some of the shock scares that the movie relies on. But in this case I felt like I had to award it an extra half star for the sheer ingenuity it demonstrated, not to mention its impact on future movies in the same genre. I have no doubt that the 2007 version of me would have given either 4.5 stars, or the five stars I gave Cloverfield.

But here's something interesting. As I check Letterboxd to ensure that I did give Cloverfield five stars, I see that I didn't. I see that I didn't even give if 4.5 stars. I see that I gave Cloverfield "only" four stars. Four stars to a film I saw twice in the theater.

Now of course, that was not a 2008 star rating. That was a retroactive star rating assigned sometime in 2012, when I first got started on Letterboxd. This provides an interesting window into how much my idea of how to provide star ratings has changed in just four years. It seems inconceivable to me that a film that I ranked in my top ten for a year could have gotten less than 4.5 stars from me. Perhaps in 2012 I was undergoing a slight lull in my appreciation of Cloverfield. As a matter of fact, looking back now, I saw Cloverfield for the third time in May of 2011, within a year of when I would have been providing that star rating. And I do remember being slightly less enthralled with it.

Well, it's definitely a different me now. Chalk up yet another 4.5-star review on Letterboxd. I'm hopeless.

But at least this means I'm seeing a bunch of good movies these days. And making up for the fact that I should have seen some of them long ago.

How much footage is there left to find?

I have been excited to see Apollo 18 ever since I first got a glimpse of this poster and first got a hint what it was about.

This, despite the fact that the found footage genre has steadily been wearing thin with me, to the point that it culminated in a really disappointing experience earlier this week.

In order to account for how I went from excitement to wariness regarding found footage, let's start at the beginning. Not the beginning of the genre -- if I'm not careful, someone will tell me in my comments section about how the first found footage movie was made in 1959. The beginning for me, which was about a dozen years ago. (And thank goodness wikipedia has a comprehensive page on the found footage genre, which should make this easy for me.) Since we're starting at the beginning for me, these films are not listed in the order of their release, but rather, the order that I saw them -- which makes more sense as a way of documenting my own personal experiences with found footage.

The Blair Witch Project (1999, Daniel Myrick & Edward Sanchez). How you reacted to Blair Witch was a function of when you saw it within the hype cycle. Since I saw it more than a week before its release date, you better bet I was trumpeting its greatness to the skies. I clearly remember, as we left the theater, my friend saying to me "That's the scariest movie I've ever seen." I wasn't willing to go that far, though it had definitely disturbed me -- in part because it felt so fresh. I loved the conceit that a video camera had just been found containing this footage. I don't think they went so far as to say that the people in it hadn't been identified -- but that wasn't necessary. The people had been identified, they were missing, and this is the only footage that gave any clue what happened to them. And it ends when the last person is no longer able to push the record button on the camera. Simple, beautiful, frightening. And a seemingly insatiable appetite for found footage is born.

The Last Broadcast (1998, Lance Weiler & Stefan Avalos). While I was still in the dizzy spell of Blair Witch, I saw a movie directed by a couple guys who claimed that Blair Witch had ripped them off. I know this not only because of what they said publicly, but because I interviewed Lance Weiler and Stefan Avalos (actually, just one of them, but I can't remember which -- I think it was Weiler) for a piece I wrote in Time Out New York. Their story involves filmmakers getting lost in the New Jersey Pine Barrens while searching for the Jersey Devil. There are similarities to Blair Witch, sure, but the main reason I'm including it here is because wikipedia's found footage page reminded me of its existence. It's not strictly a found footage film because it also includes interviews taped after the fact, giving it the structure of a more traditional documentary (albeit a fake one). Also, it's not very good -- the main reason I didn't buy it when these guys said Blair Witch ripped them off. It's kind of like those persistent accusations that J.K. Rowling ripped off the idea for Harry Potter. Okay, but who came through with the execution to make it a worldwide phenomenon?

Cloverfield (2008, Matt Reeves). Given the phenomenal success of Blair Witch, it's kind of hard to believe that found footage kind of went into hibernation for almost a decade. According to wikipedia, there were movies made in this genre, but you tell me if you've heard of any of them: The St. Francisville Experiment (2000), The Collingswood Story (2002), August Underground's Mordum (2003), September Tapes (2004), The Zombie Diaries (2006). No? Me neither. But found footage came roaring back, somewhat literally, with Cloverfield in 2008. What I appreciated so much about Cloverfield was not only that it did what Blair Witch did -- giving us a bunch of footage that, while amazing, seemed like something somebody could have actually shot with one video camera -- but it seamlessly introduced special effects into the equation, giving the monster an undeniable verisimilitude. I loved it so much that I saw it twice in the theater -- which I also did for Blair Witch.

Quarantine (2008, John Erick Dowdle). I was still high on Cloverfield when I saw Quarantine, and liked it so much that I wasn't sure, while I was watching it, which film was better. Since then it has become crystal clear, as I've seen Cloverfield a third time and given Quarantine less and less of a thought with each passing year. Still, the found footage genre was honored quite well with this entry, which I didn't even know at the time was a remake of the Spanish film REC. To my great shame, I still have not seen REC or its sequel, otherwise those would certainly be discussed here. (Wikipedia actually shows REC as having two more sequels scheduled for the future, so you could probably write a diminishing returns post about just the REC series.) Anyway, I thought the zombie movie was a good next place to go with the found footage genre ... even though it had already been there with several entries that I hadn't seen.

Diary of the Dead (2008, George A. Romero). Such as Diary of the Dead, George Romero's requisite dalliance with found footage, released earlier in the year and seen by me a couple months after Quarantine. This film was an almost unqualified disappointment for me. A key ingredient in selling us a found footage film is that the actors can make us believe they are real people -- the video camera medium has an extremely exacting standard when it comes to acting. The actors just didn't pull it off here, and moreover, I found the zombie stuff to be unexciting. Diary of the Dead is not terrible, but neither is it worthy.

Paranormal Activity (2009, Oren Peli). Remember what I said about the Blair Witch hype cycle? I saw Paranormal Activity after it had been the theaters for a couple weeks, and after they'd already started showing footage of Micah Sloat's body being hurled at the camera in the TV commercials. (Talk about spoiling a movie in the ads -- that's one of the last things to happen in the narrative.) I was occasionally impressed and a bit scared, but ultimately disappointed in Paranormal Activity. I wouldn't say that my wariness with found footage was increasing, although it could have been ... but my next two experiences were quite good ones.

The Last Exorcism (2010, Daniel Stamm). Quite simply, I loved this movie. It didn't get lots of love from critics, but I loved the idea of a charlatan exorcist setting out to make a movie to debunk his own scam -- and then happening upon a real case of devil possession. The effects were very credible in this film, and it chilled me. Plus, Stamm gets a really charismatic lead performance from Patrick Fabian. I guess the ending left a little to be desired, but until then, this movie completely had me. Although the subject matter is somewhat similar to Paranormal Activity, the approach is entirely different and it worked a lot better for me.

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010, Tod Williams). Even though I'd been somewhat non-plussed by Paranormal Activity, I knew I would eventually be seeing its sequel, and that eventuality arrived sooner rather than later, only a couple months after it arrived on DVD. And for reasons I can't entirely articulate here, I liked it a lot better than the first. Maybe there was less hype and maybe they spoiled less in the ads, but I was really on board with this movie the whole time. And liked the way it ultimately tied into the narrative of the original. Doesn't mean I'm going to be lining up for PA3 this Halloween.

Trollhunter (2010, Andre Ovredal). I've seen this title also written as The Troll Hunter and Trollhunters, but I'm going with one word and singular. And I guess I might have been that much more excited about Apollo 18 if I hadn't just seen Trollhunter on Sunday and Monday nights. (We had to continue it to the next night because it was putting us to sleep). I feel very uncharitable saying this, because Trollhunter should have been great, and I really want to champion a little underdog Norwegian film that uses believable CG trolls to convince us of the authentic nature of the footage. But Trollhunter helped me recognize two other crucial elements of the found footage genre beyond those I've already discussed: 1) There has to be a story; 2) You have to care about the characters. It's kind of odd to say this, because in theory, a bunch of found video tape footage only contained whatever the cameraman happened to record during the days and weeks of time from the first bit of footage to the last. All the character development could be occurring off camera and we're just not seeing it. But found footage films need to be clever enough to get the character development on camera, as well as including enough of a narrative arc to make us want to know what happens next. As much as I enjoyed the idea of three intrepid film students following around a mysterious man who's posing as a bear poacher, but is actually killing trolls with giant concentrated beams of UV light, it just didn't play out on screen the way I wanted it to. We never got to know the characters any better and their interactions with the trolls were not building toward any kind of climax -- except for the fact that you know they have to disappear eventually, else their footage would not have been "found." I so wanted to like Trollhunter better -- instead it left me feeling a bit despondent about found footage as a genre.

And so that's where the release of Apollo 18 finds me. On the one hand, I'm excited to see a found footage movie set in space, because to my knowledge, that hasn't happened yet. (You could set a found footage movie in the future, but that would take away from its sense of immediacy, which is key to the effect it's supposed to have on us.) On the other, I'm freshly wary of this type of movie and sort of doubt that the surprises it contains will knock my socks off. In movies like this, it helps to see what the studio thinks of it -- and the fact that they're releasing it on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, the same day that the hilariously titled Shark Night 3D is also being released, gives me plenty of doubt. Besides, how was this footage "found," anyway -- did some other astronaut stumble across a video camera half-submerged in moon sand? (Kidding -- "found footage" is not quite so literal as that.)

In a way, it seems a little unkind to the found footage genre to have written this post. As I've gone through writing about the nine films mentioned above, I realize that I have quite positive things to say about five of those nine, and two of the last three. Not great proof of a downward trend, ultimately. However, it's not always possible to tell in advance when your saturation point will be reached on something. You may think you're fine with a particular cinematic trend, then one day you just decide you've had enough. Like, I didn't realize I was over Zooey Deschanel until I started seeing ads for her new Fox show, New Girl. Then I decided instantly that she was played out.

I'm probably going to see a movie this afternoon, after I've been on baby duty for a couple hours following my anticipated early release from work. I could see Apollo 18 -- I could easily see it. But maybe I'll wait. Maybe today I'll let a different "gimmick" -- although I hesitate to call it that -- get me in theater, as I see Circumstance, the drama about Iranian lesbians.

I'm worried they'll disappear at the end of the film for an entirely different reason -- one that's sadly based on the realities of our world, rather than fantasy.

Posters of the apocalypse

We love movies about the end of the world, don't we?

Even if we know there's a high likelihood they will suck, our excitement overwhelms us -- doesn't it?

But I'm wondering if that phenomenon wouldn't be half as powerful without a tradition of truly captivating posters ... which, a lot of times, were for movies that really sucked.

It remains to be seen what we'll think of Battle: Los Angeles, but I can tell you that the poster you see above absolutely thrilled me. It perfectly accomplishes what posters for apocalyptic movies set out to do -- it provides a single-image encapsulation of the idea of normal life supplanted by chaos. What better way to indicate "business as usual" turned upside down, than surfers waiting for the next big wave as aliens rain the heavens with artillery fire?

It's that mixture of everyday things we recognize and exotic things we don't recognize that makes the image so powerful. And that's why I think the poster for Battle: LA you see below is not as effective:

Sure, there's a basic impressiveness here: A single soldier stands and looks at ... something. We don't know what. And that's part of the problem. Is it an alien craft? Is it a chunk of land turned up on its side, and the spiky objects we're seeing are buildings or other parts of the industrial landscape? We can't really tell. It still makes me want to see the movie, but not the way the surfing poster makes me want to see the movie.

So I thought today it would be fun to go back and look at other posters of the apocalypse, and to dissect how they used familiar images to whet our appetite for the movie in question ... and whether that whetted appetite ended up resulting in a satisfying movie.

Let's start with the most recent obvious example, which also has a whole series of posters associated with it:

2012 (2009, Roland Emmerich)


These posters are, frankly, perfect. They are ludicrous at the same time that they are somehow deliciously plausible. Waves crashing over the Himalayas? Not on your life would that ever happen. But would I like to see a movie where it happens? Yup, I think so. Emmerich et al were also smart to use the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil, since it has a basic awesomeness that is enhanced by collapsing under the weight of a tidal wave. The final image is interesting to me, referencing the most orgiastic destruction depicted in the movie, when plate tectonics rip apart the west side of Los Angeles. It's interesting because there's a billboard for Battle: Los Angeles that features the same section of town, with those artillery blasts from the surfing poster above -- I'm wondering if that's an intentional allusion (or else direct theft) from the 2012 advertising campaign.

Was it worth it? I thought so, yes. The destruction was great on its own terms, and just removed enough that you didn't have to ponder the billions of people who were dying. Some criticized the movie for that very reason, and for dozens of other reasons, not the least of which is that they have a knee-jerk hatred for everything made by Roland Emmerich. I did previously as well, but this one really worked for me. And speaking of Emmerich ...

The Day After Tomorrow (2004, Roland Emmerich)


Emmerich tried to capitalize on our fears of climate change with The Day After Tomorrow, and this poster was a good start. The Statue of Liberty, up to her nose in snow? My God! AND IT MAY BE HAPPENING AS SOON AS TWO DAYS FROM NOW!

Was it worth it? Not really. The Day After Tomorrow was silly. I was able to appreciate it only on the level of seeing some of the special effects, but to be honest, the catastrophic phenomenon depicted here does not lend itself to effects the way some of his other phenomena do. In fact, the scene I remember most was where tornadoes were ripping apart Los Angeles, which doesn't even really jive with the rest of the movie. Emmerich basically threw it in there because he could. And speaking of uses of the Statue of Liberty ...

Cloverfield (2008, Matt Reeves)


The Day After Tomorrow poster shows only the statue's head, while this poster shows only the statue's body -- because the head has been ripped off its shoulders by a giant reptilian alien. The smart thing about the Cloverfield poster is that it reminds everyone of their first exposure to the movie, which was that great teaser trailer that went viral in late 2007, in which the final shot is the statue's head coming to a rest in the street somewhere, uptown from Liberty Island. The events depicted in Cloverfield may not lead to the end of the world, but who knows ... they may.

Was it worth it? HELLS yes. Cloverfield was awesome. I got it on BluRay for Christmas and am looking forward to my third viewing. And speaking of the Statue of Liberty again ...

Planet of the Apes (1968, Franklin J. Schaffner)


Of course, all these other movies' usages of the Statue of Liberty owe a debt to how it was used as a gut punch at the end of Planet of the Apes. Having this iconic image sunken into the sand just killed us -- and by "us," I mean people who saw it in the theater, which does not include me, as I was not born for another five years.

Was it worth it? Well, duh -- Planet of the Apes is a classic. However, I have to wonder if this poster was used to advertise it at the time, or only in retrospect. I'm thinking retrospect. Given that it was a highly guarded secret that this ape planet was Earth, intended to Shyamalan us 30 years before Shyamalan, I doubt they would have revealed it in the original advertising campaign. But back to Roland Emmerich ...

Independence Day (1996, Roland Emmerich)


Emmerich first started blowing up the world back in 1996, with Independence Day. Talk about making it personal for us -- the White House getting blasted by an alien laser beam became the signature image of the film. And there's something about when you get to the president, who should be untouchable, that really strikes a chord with us. In fact, you could say that the White House bit worked so well, Emmerich intentionally alluded to it in 2012 with the scene where the capsized battleship flattens the White House, after riding on the crest of a tidal wave. That one scene is like every exciting thing from every disaster movie, rolled into one. (The Empire State building poster looks nicer and is good, too -- and certainly wouldn't have been possible post-9/11).

Was it worth it? I am not a fan of Independence Day. But I did like those few scenes with maximum possible destruction. They lived up to what I was expecting. And speaking of tidal waves ...

Deep Impact (1998, Mimi Leder)


Both asteroid movies that came out in 1998 were all about the tidal wave that was going to destroy the world, but only Deep Impact emphasized these in the ad campaign, while Armageddon focused more on the heroic and patriotic oil riggers-turned-astronauts. Although this poster cheeses it up a bit by showing the human drama implied by the world's coastal regions being violently drenched, the sight of the wave bearing down on New York City captures the situation pretty well.

Was it worth it? Yeah, I really liked Deep Impact -- in part because of the human drama I just poked fun at a minute ago. What can I say, I'm a sap. I should probably see it again to be sure, but I really liked it.

Okay, this post is getting long, so let's hurry through these last couple:

The Core (2003, Jon Amiel)


Talk about preposterous ... the idea behind The Core was that the Earth's core had stopped, and some scientists/adventurers had to drill into it to jump-start it. This presented all kinds of visual problems about how to represent the threat, and what they ended up with was merely adequate. Not only is the part of the Earth's surface shown in this image too abstract to make out, making the threat abstract as well, but the deep fissure depicted here is not actually the outcome of the threat -- more than anything else, it shows the hole they'd have to burrow to get down to the core.

Was it worth it? Hopefully the abstract advertisements kept people away, because this movie was not good. However, not knowing exactly where the threat is did not matter here ...

The Day After (1986, Nicholas Meyer)


This is cheating a little bit -- The Day After was a TV movie rather than a theatrical release, so our appetite for it was not whetted by a poster. In fact, this image probably accompanied the eventual video release. But the nuclear blast in the middle of an American city is so effective that it doesn't really matter which city it is -- though I believe the action was set around Kansas City.

Was it worth it? To this day I still identify The Day After with all my fears of nuclear annihilation. It was damn effective.

I had a couple more I was going to do, but all the image files attached to this post were causing Blogger to act funny -- images disappearing (possibly being "behind" other images), etc. So I'll just leave off there. You've had enough. I'll let you off the hook.