The Movies

Let me start this post out with some good news. The Dark Knight is incredible. If you do not go see it before school starts, you are a bad person. Not seeing this movie will corrupt your moral fiber.

But, this post is not to lavish praise upon the Dark Knight with its compelling characters, stunning action sequences, and clever plot. Oh no, this is dedicated to two movies I had high hopes for but failed miserably. Movies that disappointed me so much that it defies any normal simile. I speak of Cloverfield and Beowulf.

These movies seem like they would be right up my alley. After all, Cloverfield is about a Class 5 Sea Monster terrorizing New York City. And Beowulf is defined by the monsters he fights. He really fights them all. He fights a Class 3 Ground Monster (Grendel), a Class 4 Sea Monster (Grendel's Mom), and a Class 5 Sky Monster (the dragon). All he needs is to fight a Cave Monster and he'll have a full house. And yes, I have developed a bureaucratic method of Monster Classification, with Class 1 being relatively docile and Class 5 being some sort of apocalypse monster. The details of the system are for another day.

Here's what Cloverfield did wrong. First they made an 80 minute monster movie and spent twenty minutes, a full quarter of the film, at some party before the monster comes out. And the success of Lost seems to have convince J.J. Abrams that explanations are for suckers. Because not once in the ensuing hour of monster mayhem is an explanation given about anything. In retrospect, it was probably a good idea, because when I did get an explanation from the internet, it sucked. I'll let Wikipedia explain it.

Abrams described the creature as a baby who has been underwater for thousands of years

A baby, that is thousands of years old. Yeah, that makes sense. A truly ancient baby. And it gets worse. According to the viral sites, the monster was awakened by a satellite crash by some sort of deep sea slushee company. That's right. They expect me to believe that, first of all, a company big enough to have oil tankers and satellites would produce slushees. Second, they expect me to believe that there are valuable ingredients for slushees in the deep sea.

But it gets worse. In the film, when they have the occasion to explain something, they don't do it. For instance, one uninteresting survivor that the cameraman likes for some reason gets bitten by the inexplicable dog monsters that live on the giant monster. You think "well that is unfortunate" until she gets to a medical center and all the doctors freak out when they see it. So they drag her into a translucent tend and she explodes in silhouette or something. What a let down. I know, in theory, what you don't see is more terrifying, but in this case, we desperately needed to know what to be afraid of. I'm sure being blown up is bad, but it hardly seems like getting an entire hospital worked up about. Worst case scenario is that it is really disgusting. Not quite a national security concern.

But it gets worse. Somehow the monster is unkillable. The viral community insists that it is because the monster lives in the deep sea and is immune to very low and very high temperatures. I want to know how that renders him invulnerable from point black annihilation! So what if he can stand some heat, what about all the deadly, deadly shrapnel? Or the concussions from impact? Worse yet, the cameraman gets eaten by the monster, drops the camera, and the main character goes up and gets the camera. Never mind that the monster is big enough to swallow the cameraman whole. Never mind that the camera should have broke when dropped from 30 feet in the air. Never mind that there is a city destroying monster in front of the camera. No, let's get it back because J.J. Abrams still wanted to waste more of my life.

Then finally, one last blow that ruined the movie. At the end of the movie, there's some indistinguishable blurb that, according to the internet, when listened to backwards is "It's Still Alive" said by the main character. Now this is a bit odd because of the much talked about Hammer Down procedure wherein the Air Force drops a lot of bombs on it and blah de blah de blah. Clearly, it didn't work. But isn't it obvious that a bombing run that failed to kill a guy under a bridge in Central Park would also fail to kill a much larger monster?

For the sake of brevity, I'm skipping over the "alternate" endings (which were exactly the same) and the inexplicable nature of the fireballs the monster throws at the start.

Beowulf should have been a slam dunk. It's a classic tale of Norse Mythology. But Robert Zemeckis decides that, as the director of Back to the Future, he knows way more about Norse mythology than the Norse did. Allow me to list just a few of his more noticeable mistakes.

1. How about instead of a mead hall, we made Heorot a castle. Everyone knows the vikings had castles... NOT!
2. How about we make Grendel have really sensitive hearing so his senseless murders were justified?
3. How about when Grendel attacks, we make the fire burn blue and flicker, making the whole hall look like some sort of 6th century rave?
4. How about we incorporate the rise of Christianity into the movie for some reason even though that region would not convert for another 500 years?
5. How about we make Beowulf fight Grendel naked?
6. How about we replace everything the book says about Grendel and his mother with Angelina Jolie?
7. How about we don't even bother animating a different look for the character of Grendel's mother? It can literally just be a CGI Angelina Jolie that floats and stuff.
8. How about we imply that Angelina Jolie has sex with the rulers of Heorot to create monsters?
9. How about we forget all about Beowulf's Kingdom and never mention it again?
10. How about we change Wigluf from Beowulf's last loyal thane, a young prince from Sweden, to his oldest comrade-in-arms?
11. How about we change Beowulf from the consummate Norse Hero to some sort of whiny manwhore?
12. How about we make killing a dragon with your bare hands not cool?

Those twelve concepts the Zemeckis had for Beowulf are why I hated that movie so much.