Lab Notes
And Monsters See Us Through

Matt Reeves is not exactly a rookie director, but his previous credits center mainly around the WB network's New York college drama, Felicity. At first glance he would seem to be out of his depth in a project like Cloverfield, with an (ahem!) larger-than-life script by genre veteran Drew Goddard (Lost, Alias, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and stunning creature effects by ILM/Lucasfilm alumnus Phil Tippett, who also brought us the zoological delights of Jurassic Park and Starship Troopers. And yet in a funny way Reeves is on his home turf, because the story is as much about young Manhattanites coming of age as it is about massive death and destruction.

As with classic American disaster movies like Earthquake (1974), Cloverfield introduces a cast of sympathetic characters with an assortment of real-world problems, and then catapults them into a situation far beyond their control, just to see how they'll react. And yet Cloverfield avoids the disaster-movie stereotype by mixing in liberal doses of the hunted claustrophobia of Aliens and the first-person shakiness of The Blair Witch Project, all set against the backdrop of a Godzilla-esque monster attack. It's hard to shake a bag of clichés and have a self-assembled masterpiece pop out, but surprisingly enough, Reeves seems to have managed it.

Of course, the very first movie featuring a big monster loose in an urban area was King Kong, which hit the silver screen way back in 1932. Godzilla was partly an homage to Kong; the name Gojira means something like "gorilla whale" in Japanese. The two monsters even faced off in the 1963 King Kong vs. Godzilla. This ought to have been a colossal mismatch, given that Kong is only 50 feet tall, whereas Godzilla tops out at 400, but that movie took all kinds of liberties, giving the ape king not only a tenfold increase in size but also lightning powers and other silliness. Suffice it to say that the boys at Toho Studios had a thing for Kong.

Tokyo and Manhattan stomp

Still, the more important fact about Godzilla was that he marked a turning point in Japanese psychology. He was, quite simply, Japan's way of getting over the bomb. Although the city of Hiroshima was leveled by an atomic explosion on Aug. 6, 1945, and another blast struck Nagasaki three days later, the Japanese people were not generally aware of this new terror until the following week, when their emperor, Hirohito, gave a nationwide radio address explaining the problem and urging unconditional surrender. The resulting sense of humiliation and exhaustion—for noble samurai to be beaten by eggheads and bumpkins!—must have been overwhelming.

But in 1954, when the original Gojira was released in Japan, it was a calling card. After the trauma and physical damage of World War II, Japan was finally functional enough to produce a motion picture that appealed to a global audience. And while Japan was still under American military occupation and soaking up billions of dollars in much-needed reconstruction aid, the movie also dared to point the finger of blame squarely at the United States, whose undersea H-bomb tests had apparently created the monster. Ah, Japanese subtlety. Internally, though, Godzilla was a kind of affirmation, a self-reassurance that after almost nine years of rebuilding, the Japanese people were sufficiently "over it" to sit around and watch, as entertainment, the destruction of Tokyo in radioactive fire. It was a cathartic moment for the Land of the Rising Sun, and so wildly popular that it inspired an entire industry of films, toys, games, comic books and Halloween costumes that's still going strong today.

And that same psychology is evident—overwhelmingly evident!—in Cloverfield. Again and again, we're confronted with news footage and home-shot video of collapsing buildings, billowing dust clouds, papers fluttering down from broken, smoking facades and crowds of people streaming away from the disaster site in varying states of disrepair. There's no denying that Cloverfield is, first and foremost, a movie about 9/11. Or more properly, a movie about how "over it" we are because yeah, we'll not only watch this movie, but walk away happier and more energized than we went in.

Scientifically speaking, I have some issues with really big creatures (see "Cubed, Squared Kong," December 2005), but since Tippett's Cloverfield monster doesn't climb buildings or leap in the air or perform WWF moves against some other titan, the credibility problems are minimized. As for a building that tips over in one piece instead of collapsing ... I'm tempted to issue a credibility ticket here as well, but in fact something very similar happened during Japan's 1995 earthquake in Kobe—not once but several times. It's unusual, and when it happens it's usually the result of liquefaction—a sudden mixing of soil and groundwater that can turn solid ground to instant mud, into which a building's foundation can sink. If one side sinks more than the other, then yeah, the building can gently tip over against a neighbor and come to rest. And on Manhattan—a narrow, flat-topped island sitting barely above sea level—the stomping of a giant creature probably could produce this effect.

The kids are all right

The other thing that got my eyebrows up was the apparent invulnerability of the creature. The smaller monsters (babies? parasites?) could be killed by small arms fire and wounded by fire axes, but the gorilla-whale itself never seemed to shed a drop of blood or a pound of flesh, even when struck by bunker-busting smart bombs. This is possible if its outer skin is really thick and composed of something fibrous and tough like woven spider silk, but this further increases the amount of weight the creature would have to carry around. It also suggests a mode of attack that the army didn't try: dropping highly corrosive chemicals. Remember the carborane superacid we talked about last month? That would likely burn a hole right through the monster and down to the streets below. Still, it's not like we have barrels of that stuff lying around in case of alien attack.

So again, I have to say that the really interesting science here is mainly in the field of psychology. By the time Godzilla appeared to warn us about the dangers of nuclear war, the Russians already had atomic bombs of their own, and the threat of global thermonuclear annihilation seemed all too real. Partly in response to these Cold War pressures, America's middle class fled the inner cities in record numbers, creating the suburban sprawl we're all familiar with today. And in the 1990s, when the Cold War had ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the middle class started returning to the downtown areas it had previously vacated—a trend that terrorism has done little to reverse. Now it's simply a numbers game; however likely it is that some city will eventually be destroyed (see "Crash Test Cities," January 2005), there seems little chance that we'll lose all our cities at once, over the span of a single afternoon.

And here, too, Cloverfield serves as a Gojirian affirmation of public spirit: Aside from momentary bouts of panic or indecision, the kids in this movie are mostly brave and calm, rescuing friends and strangers alike, relying on authorities when they must and on themselves when they can. Most importantly, they also take personal responsibility for documenting the disaster unfolding around them in a clear, concise and rational manner. In an age of citizen journalists, when bloggers and amateur webcasts threaten to put networks and newspapers out of business, can we expect any less?

Sources:
The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com): "Cloverfield", "Earthquake"
Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org): "Godzilla", "Carborane"
Hardy, Phil: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies, Woodbury Press, 1984
Rovin, Jeff: The Encyclopedia of Monsters, Facts On File Inc., 1989
Braile, Larry: Earthquake Hazard Information - Photos of Earthquake Damage, Modes of building Failure - Part 2, http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~braile/edumod/eqphotos/eqphotos2.htm
Encyclopedia Britannica 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite: "World War II"