Cloverfield and batteries...

I went to see the movie Cloverfield two Saturdays ago. It's the new movie from the Bad Robot production group that brought you the shows Alias and Lost. J.J. Abrams is the producer. If you haven't seen the movie and plan on seeing it, which probably includes none of you, then stop reading. If you haven't seen it and probably won't, then keep on reading.

The movie is basically a monster movie in the same general premise that Godzilla was. A monster attacks a city for some reason and things get destroyed. Where it differs from monster movies like that is that it's shot to look like it was filmed on a small camcorder. This has been tried before in other films like the Blair Witch Project and the Last Broadcast. In the case of the Blair Witch Project, most of the 'scares' occur off screen. It's only at the end that we see something that's a little disturbing, but even that loses its luster after a second viewing.

In the case of Cloverfield, the movie purported to be footage found at the site in New York City formerly known as Central Park. The footage with a guy and a girl talking. It's the morning after of a sleep over involving Rob and Beth. It then cuts to a party where a woman named Lily is telling her boyfriend, Jason, Rob's brother, to man the camera for a going away party. Rob has just accepted a job in Japan and she threw the party.

Jason then quickly asks their buddy Hud to man the camera. Hud is a doofus, but he willingly starts filming and asking goofy questions. Along the way, he awkwardly tries to hit on Lily's friend Marlena.

The party is a stereotypical Manhattan party filled with tons of young and pretty city dwellers, filled with lots of indie rock and filled with lots of inane dialogue. I read one review of this movie in which the reviewer complained that the party scene was too long to the point that you wished that a giant monster would drop down on the sky and start wrecking havoc. I have to agree with a lot of that, but maybe that was the point. You really don't care too much for the characters because they seem like spoiled young adults, so when shit starts to happen, you sort of believe the confusion and selfish choices a few of them make.

At the party, Rob finally shows up and so does the girl he likes, Beth, who shows up with another guy! The word is 'ouch' to describe this encounter, but I'm not feeling sorry for this guy. He's apparently had years to describe his feelings for Beth, who he slept with once two weeks prior (the footage at the beginning was the morning after), but is surprised that she'd find someone else when he announced that he was taking a job in Japan. Rob and Beth fight, Beth leaves, and Rob leaves the party to feel sorry for himself. It's shortly after this point that a giant monster starts to attack the city.

Giant explosions happen across the city. A few buildings get destroyed. People start to freak out and run around in all directions. In the distance, it looks like a giant something is tearing up buildings. The people quickly decide to leave the city, but no one thinks to drive. Everyone starts to walk out of town across one of the bridges (forget which). Halfway across, it is attacked and it falls down, so the survivors of that have to turn around and get out another way. During this commotion, Beth calls Rob. She's hurt in her apartment building and is pleading for help. Rob, of course, decides to go find her. The problem is that this is the direction of the giant monster.

Along the way, they encounter the monster and its fight against the Army as well as some of the monster's babies, children or whatever they were. The babies look and act like little lizard spiders. The gang encounter the little monsters and have to run and hide. In the meantime, the monster is still wrecking havoc. The Army is considering blowing up Manhattan, so they only have a few hours to get out of town.

All in all, I thought it was a really good movie. Previous attempts at a first-person perspective movie have been mostly disappointing. This one had enough realism that you could believe that someone was shooting the footage of this event. The camera's narrator, Hud, while a little goofy, has the right amount of humor, fear, cowardice and nobility to save the footage from feeling hollow. You actually get that this guy is freaking out while running away from the monster.

Those with weak stomachs will want to avoid this film. I've heard of people getting really ill at all the bouncing and running around from the first-person camera, but I was fine when I watched it. If you go, don't be one of those people that were warned beforehand that the movie was a shaky perspective. The information is clearly out there that this is that type of movie. So if you're just one of those people that go to see movies without researching what you're getting yourself into, then I don't really feel sorry for you for seeing something you probably didn't like. Do your homework beforehand. Seriously, we live in the information age. If you can yap on your cellphone while you're supposed to be bagging your groceries and holding up the grocery store line, then you can take the time to get on a computer. Sit. Type. Click. Read. Easy. There. I feel better.

What's intriguing to me about this movie are that people aren't questioning the premise that a huge monster can suddenly appear and start destroying New York. I think that's an accepted fact that this couldn't seriously happen at any time. We are the jaded generation after all, or at least my generation is. I don't know about Generation Y, but I think it'd be the same. We've been raised on monster and fantasy movies that have pushed the envelope of what is real and what isn't real. However, when a movie like Independence Day comes along, people my age are more likely to nitpick the viability of Jeff Goldblum hacking into the alien mother ship's computer with a Macintosh laptop and giving their computer a virus than the viability of 13 huge ships flying across the universe undetected until they fly over our cities.

So I guess it shouldn't come as a shock to me that people are nitpicking Cloverfield because of its controversial use of batteries: cell phone batteries and camera batteries.

After the monster attacks and Rob gets his phone call from Beth, he quickly realizes that his cell phone battery is almost dead. So instead of rushing out of the city, he rushes into an electronics store, finds a new battery, slaps it into his phone and tries to contact Beth again. That's it. That's a huge controversy.

I've read many discussions on the internet movie forums where people are declaring how false it is that a person could just get a brand new cell phone battery and use it because the package always tells you to charge it before you use it. Then people that work for an electronics store claim that they have some sort of charge because the batteries have to be tested before they leave the factory. Then other people tell their stories about how they have tried this before and found that they needed to charge their battery. Then other people challenge that by stating that sometimes they lose their charge from sitting on the shelf and other times it still has some of that factory charge left. And it goes on and on.

The other controversy is about the battery in the camcorder that Hud uses. Most batteries that come with a camcorder generally last between an hour and two hours, so it stands to reason that some people don't believe that Hud could be filming for over 7 hours. Now here is where it gets a little stupid in my opinion.

First of all, it's never mentioned how long Hud films for. You get the impression that he either filmed continuously and had it edited out for the flim version, that he was shutting the camcorder off and on during the night. Either scenario will drain most batteries in a few hours. However, it's also pretty obvious that he was shutting the camera off and on as he had breaks in action. Even if you have a low-cost battery, you can stretch the battery life by shutting it off and on. My old camcorder from the early 1990s had a two-hour battery that I used one day at Disney World for almost the whole day. So now over a decade later we have made significant advances in battery life. I've seen batteries listed at Best Buy that last for over 6 hours.

The problem is, it's never spelled out for the viewer in the movie. So this has led to long discussions about the feasibility what type of camera it was, how long he filmed, whether or not he kept the camera on the whole time, whether or not he recorded the whole time, etc. As a result, people are confused.

Even my brother, Joe, was wondering about that. He admitted that he was a little confused about how long a battery should last.

That's the problem with the viewing public. We need things spelled out for us.

My one big question in the movie is the viability of New York clearing out. For sure, there are people scrambling out of the way, but the city seems devoid of running cars, kids and old people. I didn't get the sense that there was a mad scramble for all of New York to leave the city. I would think that this would take days. But again, this isn't spelled for me, so now I'm a hypocrite for even questioning it while I'm mocking people who question other aspects of the movie. So much for my original premise.