Cloverfield: Boredom and Epiphany.

I’ve been considering watching Cloverfield for some time but couldn’t decide whether it appealed to me or not. Today there was little on the shelves that took my fancy and so I decided to take the plunge and buy the 2008 (I think) blockbuster movie that everybody was talking about (except me.) And now I feel entitled to a 22% refund (17.66/80 = 22. I seem to have quite the head for figures.) Here’s the tip:

If you haven’t yet seen this movie and decide to watch it, fast forward to 17mins 40. That’s when the delinquent monster sets about trashing NYC and the fun begins. (And fun is what it is; it isn’t the least bit scary. Jaws is scary; Alien is scary; most Japanese horror films are scary; and the fact that Americans voted Trump into the White House is really scary. This is just fun, but to continue…)

The first seventeen minutes and forty seconds amount to probably the most boring seventeen minutes and forty seconds ever committed to celluloid. They offer nothing more than a bunch of tedious American yuppies being tediously obsessed with trivial lifestyle values (like who is having sex with whom) to an extent that only tedious American yuppies could possibly be capable of achieving. (Actually, that probably isn’t fair; yuppies tend to be pretty obnoxious wherever they come from.) But the point is that it took a monumental effort of will to sit through the aforementioned 17.40 until the monster made its welcome appearance and dropped the head of the Statue of Liberty somewhere in Midtown Manhattan without turning a single fire hydrant into an involuntary fountain. Fun. See?

But do you know what’s really interesting? I paused the film at the half way point, meaning to watch the rest tomorrow, and went back to my blog, only to find that somebody had visited from New York while I was in the very act of watching yuppies in peril in that very metropolis. Aren’t coincidences wonderful?

(And in the course of writing this post I have been struck by an epiphany of the highest order. The apparently delinquent creature is not a monster from the deep at all, but a highly evolved and supremely philanthropic being from the future who has been reading his history book and knows what happened in November 2016. Having the status of a near demi-god, he travels back in time and sets about trashing New York in the hope of taking Trump down with it, thereby saving the good Americans from the trashing that Trump is visiting on their fair country’s reputation. Let’s see what hints we get in the second half.)