Cloverfield is the anti-Web, and that's OK
As I was mulling over the odd tech-lessness of the J.J. Abrams-produced flick Cloverfield -- no smart phones apparent, no Internet, no GPS devices anywhere -- I ran across Craig Rubens' post on NewTeeVee about the exact same detail. Craig's take on the apparent tech lacuna: Cloverfield should have been released online as a mysterious download, and surrounded itself with a rat's warren of Flickr photo clues and fake profile pages, which all-lead, Wonderland-like, further into strangeness.
IOW, Cloverfield should be like Lost. And I have to respectfully disagree.
While Craig's insightful in outing Cloverfield as tech-less, what I think he's missing is how Cloverfield succeeded precisely because it eschewed the contrivance of web mystery. Without any marketing beyond a handful of trailers, J.J. Abrams' name, and a single iconic poster -- all of which hinted at monsters, but never revealed them -- the film set an MLK weekend record with $46M in box office sales. No photos of the monster were leaked (well, they were hard to find, anyway). The movie and its contents were a mystery (or in Abrams-speak, a mystery box). And its that mystery which compelled the audience to seek out the movie and then be intrigued enough to follow a shaky handycam through an hour and a half of action.
Remember how rewarding that final aerial shot of the monster was, that image you'd been waiting months and months to see? That shot was the impetus for the secrecy. And it worked to the tune of $46M.
The point is this: Sometimes blinders enhance the moviegoing (or television) experience. We don't always need that marketing smoke and those participatory mirrors. Abrams demo'd that by creating a tech-less movie that appealed to a tech-savvy audience.
In a world obsessed with hoaxes, rife with leaks, and overfull with chatty bloggers, Abrams pulled off a bigger trick than creating some intricate and -- at this point, let's face it -- hackneyed web game. He one upped that. He put butts in theater seats.
UPDATE: MMM's Chris Thilk points out that Cloverfield did indeed have a web ARG attached to it. Well damn, doesn't that just contradict, uh, everything I just wrote. But I still maintain that Cloverfield succeeded despite eschewing current tech in its storyline; the blinders of the videocamera contrivance enhance the suspense, rather than ruin the suspension of disbelief.
