"Cloverfield" has a poster

Hey, look! I'm blogging about "Cloverfield." I feel so... "in." ;)

Anyway...

The best movie poster of 2007 was/is the initial teaser poster for "D-War" (aka "Dragon Wars" now.) Now, while it doesn't even have an official title yet ("Cloverfield" is a code-name) JJ Abrams mysterious "giant monster attacks Manhattan as seen by people with camcorders" movie already has the early lead as the best poster of 2008:



First thought: Whoa.

Second, longer thought: Umm... wow. Does that shot sorta... I dunno, REMIND anyone of anything? Something like this, for example:



The similarity seems to either be intentional or at least unnavoidable. In fact, I can easily imagine some NYC theatre locations not wanting to put it up. Now, Michael Bay can get away with it when he claims that he doesn't think of 911 when crafting city-destruction scenes because, well, Michael Bay was born without a human soul. But Abrams and company, being both human and extremely insightful about humanity, MUST have either intended the analogous gut-punch this poster provides or at least recognized it and decided it was appropriate. I'm now even more strongly thinking what I was only considering when the blurry "spy" shots of this first appeared: Is this the real key to what this mystery-movie actually is?

Any monster movie lover worth his salt will tell you that the original "Gojira," ("Godzilla: King of the Monsters,") the giant-monster-attacks-city movie by which all others MUST be judged, is in large part so effective because of it's broader metaphoric meaning: It was a bombing-of-Hiroshima movie with a massive irradiated dinosaur standing in for the Enola Gay's atomic payload. Japan made THE rampaging-behemoth movie because they were able to draw on the recent memory of what it was ACTUALLY LIKE to feel the ground shake and see buildings turned to ash by sudden, unnamable force.

The 1998 American remake failed in no small part, by contrast, because of how little weight and meaning it's carnage had. Don't believe me? Go back NOW and try not to cringe at how flippant it is in it's playful trashing of the Big Apple ("Wheee! There goes the Met Life building!") and then remember that, in 1998, WE (Americans) had no shared national experience to draw on when imagining a metropolis crumbling under what seems like the wrath of a god. But that was 1998, and as photo #2 should remind you: Now we do.

So, is THAT the idea here? If "Gojira" was Hiroshima with a monster standing in for The Bomb, is THIS going to be 9-11 with a monster standing in for Mohammed Atta? Given that camcorder and news footage is how the majority of the country "experienced" the WTC attack, and that that's how we'll "experience" the events of Abrams' film, I'm definately intrigued.