Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

This movie had so much hype when it came out that I couldn’t avoid learning that this is a story in found footage about a Kaiju style attack on New York from the perspective of the running screaming little people on the ground who know almost nothing. I know it was so popular that a franchise was quickly spun up, which had varying success in recapturing the response.

It just never appealed to me before as a monster movie, but the cultural impact of at least the marketing around this movie is undeniable. I think this was among the first times a mainstream media release used an Alternate Reality Game to build buzz, and it definitely caught attention. I think some people were let down by the high expectations from the hype train, so that was more reason for me not to bother at the time.

After watching the movie:

In footage recovered from the former Central Park by the Department of Defense, we see video recorded by Rob, ecstatic to be waking up with his longtime crush Beth, where the two plan a day going out to Coney Island. A month later, Rob’s brother Jason and Jason’s girlfriend Lily are throwing a going away party for Rob before he starts his new job in Japan. Lily tells Jason to use Rob’s camera to record testimonials and document the party, but Jason quickly fobs off the camera to their friend Hud, who’s more interested in trying to chat up partygoer Marlena. Beth arrives at the party with another guy and upset with Rob. While eavesdropping documenting, Hud learns that Rob and Beth finally hooked up and then Rob never called her after, and quickly spreads the news around the party. Beth leaves the party on bad terms with Rob, and then shortly thereafter an earthquake hits and knocks out the power across the city for a while. When they can get the TV working, the local news informs the party guests of a capsized oil tanker, and then a distant explosion rains flaming debris on the block, prompting the evacuation of the building. Amid the chaos and carnage in the streets, Rob tries frantically to get Beth on the phone, and eventually hears from her that a wall in her apartment fell on her and she’s trapped. Beth’s building is toward the heart of the disaster, but Rob is determined to go get her out of there, and Jason, Lily, Hud, and Marlena agree to not let him go alone.

While found footage is a very familiar format, I really liked some of the things they did with it here. It’s often hard to justify why a camera was present for everything. The last time I saw a found footage movie I was disappointed that it eventually dropped the premise as the story left anything like a reasonable situation where in-universe cameras could be. The conceit here is that Hud is the slightly weird friend who will be told to document a party he’s not that interested in and decide that means he has a sacred duty to record the disaster of the night. But there’s also a gimmick that I don’t think could be done with anything but magnetic tape: Rob recorded his perfect day with Beth on this tape before Lily and Jason started taping over it, and so not only does it provide backstory from a totally different time and place in a way that it’s reasonable the military would include it, at strategic moments their happiness can pop up in a pause in the disaster footage for ironic contrast. I was hoping the 85 minute running runtime would coincide with the length of a tape plus credits, but it seems blank VHS tapes typically started at 120 minutes capacity.

Staying with the group of friends also keeps the viewpoint mostly away from the monster, but even so it’s not too concerned with avoiding giving us a clear look at it. It’s mostly meditated though news cameras that are going to give us the best view of the rampaging mantis they can get. It’s about as convincing as 2000s CGI could get, which is especially tough with shaking handheld cameras.

The focus on the small group of characters was so effective that I frequently found the monster stuff to be a frustrating distraction from them. This isn’t a movie about a monster attacking a city, it’s about the people under attack and what they can do when they’re completely powerless. And it tells that story so perfectly I both want more and also don’t want the world to reach out of the perfect packaging that’s been presented.

The scariest announcement of all: this blog will be ending on its fifteenth anniversary the first week of December. I’ve always thought I’d only end it when I had an upcoming project I could point to as a replacement, but the only project is my expanding family life that’s already making it hard to fit a review into every week. So for now, nothing to follow publicly aside from maybe a rare media thought now and then on my Mastodon account. What’s next is just The Unknown, the scariest thing that could possibly be on the other side of the door.