Cloverfield, over and overfield

Now that I've had a chance to see Cloverfield, I can finally peruse half an internet's worth of related stories, reviews, theories, rants, fakes, intentional and unintentional misinformation, etc., and it's to the movie's credit that I'm still doing so a couple of days later, despite the abundance of less-than-stellar conversation on, say, the IMDb board.

One of the more recurrent topics on that board (along with 'TOTAL BLAIR WITCH RIPOFF' and 'GET A TRIPOD') is the prospect of sequeldom. It had seemed likely enough, with producer/creator J.J. Abrams mentioning at some point along the way that he'd wanted Cloverfield to be an giant-monster franchise for America, but now Variety confirms that director Matt Reeves is in talks with Paramount for a sequel. Despite a large second-week drop (from first to fourth place), the movie cleared its $25 million budget and then some with an opening weekend gross around $40m, and though I've heard advertising budget estimated up to additional $25m, the movie's well in the black without the foreign/DVD numbers.

The idea of a Cloverfield sequel is fascinating; I can see all kinds of potential concepts. Reeves hinted in interviews previously that he'd considered an alternate-viewpoint camcorder story, possibly through the viewfinder of other folks glimpsed with their own cameras in the film. While that'd play too much like Cloverfield 1.5 for most viewers, it sounds like a bold experiment for a mainstream sequel. Alternately, we might see a version of events through the eyes of the military, a prequel fleshing out the internet-only backstory, or most likely, a sequel continuing the story in either of a couple ways I won't elucidate, to avoid spoiling the flick.

Cinematical writer Christopher Campbell wrote recently in his Exhibitionist column about why it's a good idea not to see Cloverfield in the theater, citing a sort of Youtubiness, a conceptual matchup between shooting on video and watching at home. It makes sense in theory, but Cloverfield also has an event quality to it that benefits from a very big screen in a dark room.

One of the things Cloverfield does well is leave space open, leave viewers curious for more information. Maybe it's training from five decades of Godzilla films, but a rampaging monster leaves us at least a little curious, and Cloverfield's web presence since its teaser premiere in front of Transformers bears that out. I'm not an ARGer, and my brief foray into Slusho and Unfiction back in July didn't last too long past my gleeful debunking spree (9th-12th), but seeing Cloverfield a couple days ago brought me right back into the fold, digging up extra movie in the forms of the other web resources.

If the guys want to make another feature, I've got no problem with it, although I doubt it'll be that alternate-viewpoint version of the same night. Cloverfield's uniqueness as a monster movie lies in its not realistic but realism-simulating approach, and if the idea is to start a new monster mythos, I'd like to treat it as real, which means a fictional deconstruction of, to begin with, a singular event: Youtube clips bouncing around, the monster equivalent of Loose Change showing up on Google Video and college campus screenings, and some people feeling the need to dig deeper while others prefer to move on with their lives.

Christopher Campbell's article and the intriguing nature of the internet content came together for me with the realization that what I'd like to see for a sequel isn't necessarily another 85-minute feature in a year and a half, but more pieces of this movie, when and wherever appropriate. Here's three minutes of it, and it offers more of what Cloverfield left me wanting than Mechagodzilla ever did, bless his anodized heart.