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This is the wallpaper on the kids' computer. Why?
Not ever having been a pre-teen boy, I never realized what it's like to be THE target audience for the movie industry. Now I do. Sometime last summer, the 12-year-old came across a mention in Mike's Buzz Bin of a new monster flick called Cloverfield. He was immediately infected, and passed the bug on to his older brother. The two spend much of their precious computer time following this Alternate Reality Game, and their time offline trying to tell the rest of us about it.The 15-year-old recently asked me if he could post his findings on GeekDad. So here they are:
Well, some of you out there might’ve heard about this new movie coming out called “Cloverfield” (or Slusho, or Cheese, or 1-18-08, or Monkey or any of the many names out there.) It’s just a monster movie where you see a Godzilla-style attack on New York City from the viewpoint of five people with a camcorder. Why is there so much buzz about this movie?
Because of trailers like these.
Shown before “Transformers,” this set the geek nation trying to find out everything they could about this movie. As the movie’s release date gets closer, viral websites, more trailers, and more clues have been popping up.
What kind of clues? There’s Slusho.jp, the fake drink company. It’s a division of Tagruato.jp
(involved with deep sea oil drilling; sounds fishy…). Tagruato has a protest group fighting against them called T.I.D.O. Wave, whose mysterious “event” against Tagruato (something to do with the monster?) failed.
All this is a VERY creative scheme by filmmaker JJ Abrams. It ranges from MySpace pages for the characters to memos included with merchandise that fans have ordered from the Slusho clothing website. (The memos talk about a Tagruato station that was destroyed… and recently someone from
T.I.D.O. revealed a sonar image of a large shape in the ocean.) With 1-18-08
coming up soon, one wonders how JJ will wrap this all up.
Since this is hard to follow, Cloverfieldclues.blogspot.com does it all for you. The blog keeps day-to-day updates on everything
Cloverfield and podcasts talking about theories every now and then. This is the best place to keep up with the ever-changing story of
Cloverfield. We’re hoping it lives up to everything it’s promising.
