Word: godzilla
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...advent of the atom bomb, the end of the world got a lot more literal. (Eliot later confessed that he wouldn't have written the same lines after the coming of the H-bomb.) One of the cultural aftershocks of the bombing of Hiroshima was the awakening of Godzilla and the Japanese monster movie as a way of reckoning with the nightmare of U.S. atomic weapons. "Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears," says J.J. Abrams, creator of Felicity, Alias and Lost and producer of Cloverfield. "When Godzilla came out, the idea of doing...
...edifice? Not the World Trade Center, this time, but the Statue of Liberty - the Lady's head is tossed like a used beer can onto a lower Manhattan street. And the Statue decapitator is not a team of al-Qaeda operatives but a scaly, 300-ft. monster, an American Godzilla...
...million questions. By which I mean: three. 1) Where did the creature come from? (The Hudson River? Or the Arctic, thawed out by climate change and sent south on tidal currents? Possibly Hoboken?) 2) What event roused it from a snooze that may date back to the dinosaur era? (Godzilla's rampage across Japan, you'll recall, was the spawn of atomic bombs dropped there.) 3) What, exactly, the heck...
...Just about every other plot and effects element in Cloverfield is familiar. The movie is basically the 1954 Godzilla (itself a gloss on Ray Harryhausen's 1953 The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, in which a prehistoric beast is roused by atomic tests to terrorize New York City) told in the style of, and with the characters from, The Blair Witch Project (but with a lot less internal cohesion; this could be called "The Blair Witch Reject"). The State of Liberty head comes from the poster for John Carpenter's Escape from New York (though that shot...
...scale models of Tokyo just right, Tsuburaya surveyed the city from rooftop elevations (on one occasion, when he was overheard talking with a colleague about how exactly they planned to destroy the neighborhood, the two were detained by security guards). Instead of filming a puppet of Godzilla in stop-motion, as O'Brien had done for King Kong, Tsuburaya put an actor in a rubber suit and ran the camera at high speed, making Godzilla's movements seem appropriately ponderous when played back. The suit, however, weighed 220 lbs. (100 kg), and the actor inside it lost...