I love it when mainstream press catches up with the Internet. Transformers opened early last week and with it came that oh-so-mysterious trailer from Bad Robot, code named Cloverfield. While we’ve been talking about the project for the last week, USA Today is finally posing their “What is it?” question today, collecting ideas from those of us who have been discussing it for the last week.
Among their listed theories are a few I haven’t heard before. Who is really guessing this low-budget approach (hand held camcorders) is an advance trailer for Voltron? We’ve all heard the popular “update on Godzilla” theory, and a few places are guessing it’s an extension of Abrams’s “Lost” series. My favorite theory, the idea that the movie comes from the H.P. Lovcraft mythos, is also listed (Ia Cthulhu F'htagn!).
At least the USA Today article confirms that the websites found last week related to prophet figure Ethan Haas are related to the movie (www.ethanhaaswasright.com and ethanhaaswaswrong.blogspot.com/). Some places were suggesting the sites were unrelated to Cloverfield, and were related to M. Night Shyamalan’s next project. Of course, the article also mistakenly gives Abrams credit for directing Cloverfield, which we know is incorrect (Matt Reeves has been uncovered as the director of the film, Abrams is just producing).
I guess the one guilty piece of happy news in the story is that USA Today is just as clueless as online reporting, if not more. Paramount is staying the course with their mysterious campaign and not revealing extra details at this point. And, with the studio continually pulling bootleg copies of the trailer from sites like YouTube, it doesn’t look like they are going to give anything more anytime soon. This Cloverfield campaign is designed to keep us guessing, and guessing is exactly what we are doing – all of us, including the mainstream press.
