Cloverfield Backlash

They say all press is good press, so with that spirit in mind, here is some of the "backlash" from the Cloverfield advertising campaign.

Neil Cavuto interviewed Alice Hoagland, who's son died on 9/11. In the interview, she asserts that Cloverfield's Statue of Liberty poster is

...taking advantage of the awful images of 9/11 and is doing it for its own profit. Unless the message is profound, unless it's talking about al Qaeda or one of al Qaeda's evil cousins, then it really should not be showing us images of the Statue of Liberty decapitated, beheaded and the images of lower Manhattan in flames.

It appears from the interview that she doesn't actually know anything about the movie, other than what she's seen in the poster, which was inspired by Escape From New York. There was no mention of her feelings on the poster for I Am Legend.












Matt Reeves, the director of Cloverfield, had this to say about the connection to 9/11:

[It works] in the same way that Godzilla was really a metaphor for its time, and was a sort of movie about the A-bomb and Hiroshima and all of that," he says. "The idea of it dealing with the anxiety of that time and that's why it captured so much attention because it tapped right into people's anxieties… I think that what was really interesting here was knowing that we were going to be dealing with the metaphor of what this was and dealing with the anxieties of our time. We thought that there would be something really sort of powerful about the idea, like in the trailer, having this very naturalistic, realistic vibe, and having you start to say, 'What is going on? This seems like a horrifying event.' And then suddenly when you see the head, everything starts to tilt like a prism. And you're like, 'Wait a minute. That couldn't be terrorism because what did they do, take off the head of the Statue of Liberty and throw it at New York? What's with that?' It evokes these things and in a way enables us -- the fun of it, the idea of it -- it enables you to approach those feelings and deal with it in a safer way. So it ends up being a kind of thrill ride and it's also evocative of those feelings and hopefully has resonance as well. At the end of the day, the movie is this giant monster movie. But there is something in the idea of what monster movies do for us, and how they can deal with our anxieties and our fears, and we really hope that this works in that way.

Merideth Blake has written an open letter to JJ Abrams, complaining about New York yet again being used as a target of destruction:

I mean, New York isn't the [only] city in America that has instantly recognizable landmarks. Couldn't you have set the movie in LA? Philadelphia? Orlando? Buffalo? It seems like it's high time some other city got the (fictional) shaft.

I have to give Blake credit, at least she did a little research about the movie first:

Apparently, it's some kind of monster movie. But I had to go to the movie's website to find this out

I guess this means the marketing is working...?

James Sanders, the author of "Celluloid Skyline", knows why New York is popular with filmmakers:

What would be the point of showing a demolished suburban street? You’d get the point but it just wouldn’t have the punch. You take the most familiar, iconic symbol of civic society in the world — a big city, and for Americans, that’s New York — and that’s where disaster is going to be the most powerful.

Former NYC Mayor Ed Koch has a different theory:

They want to see our skyscrapers destroyed because they are envious of them.

Here is another story about monster movies in NY:

• NY Daly News: Filmmakers view New York as a disaster waiting to happen

* Thank to Brian, Treefrog19, and dalphx for these stories!