J.J. Abrams is a dropkick

J.J. Abrams, is there anything this guy can’t fuck up? His movies don’t even make good trailers. I was at the cinema today and saw a trailer for… something.

It started off at a going away party for some dropkick named Rob or Ron or whatever, with all his dropkick friends saying how they’ll miss him. Then a loud bang/rumble, which a news report thinks might be some sort of earthquake, shakes the apartment. To see what’s going on some of the dropkicks decide to go up to the roof, which is the first thing I think of when in an earthquake. On the roof they see a large fireball in the distance moving through New York, throwing large pieces of debris into nearby buildings. They then run down onto the street and see a very large piece of debris coming towards them which lands in the street and is shown to be the head of the statue of liberty. The trailer then ended, it showed “2008″ then flashed the credits. The only other title cards that appeared were “From Producer J.J. Abrams” and the “Bad Robot Productions” logo. Because of this I have no idea what the hell the name of this movie is, not that I would really want to know, other than to avoid it like the plague.

The entire fiasco was made worse by the fact that the trailer was comprised of footage shot to appear as camcorder footage of the party. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m a multimedia student or because I have taste but I detest footage shoot in this style. Another nitpick with it is that when the statue of liberty’s head lands on the street, it looks too small, about the size of two or three small cars. Now to be fair I’ve never been to New York, yet alone taken a tour of the statue of liberty to see it up close, so it may actually be that size. This still doesn’t excuse that it just looks small.

I finally checked Wikipedia and the movie is called Cloverfield. It turns out the entire movie is shot to look like someone found a camcorder and watched the tape. Apparently when the statue of liberty’s head lands in the street, people get out their camera phones and take pictures, the director says this was done because this is the modern norm continuous self documentation of our lives. And once again this doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you do WHEN NEW YORK IS BEING TORN TO PEICES!

The film is based on J.J. Abrams feeling that King King is “addorable” and that we need a city destroying monster who is “insane and intense” something he realised while in a toy store in Tokyo. Which is perfectly fine, I’m sure a Tokyo toy store is a great place to get wacky ideas, if I ever go I’m sure that I’d be able to come up with some brilliant ideas, ideas that can be sold to clients for cash. Not ideas that involve reviving a genre that is basically dead outside of Japan. After all the last city destroying monster film I saw was the modern American Godzilla, which was good for some laughs and mildly entertaining, until they did the usual Hollywood thing and left the door open for a sequel… and then made an animated series.

Coming soon: Part 2, the past mistakes of J.J. Abrams