So what exactly is Cloverfield?  It's a new film, told entirely from a handheld camera (actually shot on a Panavision Genesis, according to reports), as some early 20-somethings throw a going away party for a friend named Rob.  Rob is leaving for Japan to work for a company (more on that in a moment), and this is it for him.  Unfortunately, things go wrong, as you can see in the teaser trailer here.

The fact that no one had any idea what was going on until the teaser hit is genius marketing by distributor Paramount Pictures and producer Bad Robot (JJ Abrams' company, of Lost fame).  Basically, while a bunch of young, hip New Yorkers give Rob one helluva send-off, a giant monster decides to attack NYC.

For the longest time, Cloverfield was only the codename for the film (much like Return of the Jedi used Blue Harvest as its codename).  The movie's teaser, which premiered before Transformers in early July 2007, gave a release date of 1-18-08, plus a website that had photos of the party, destruction and, for some reason, a Japanese chef, found at 1-18-08.com.

Now that Cloverfield is the official name (see the new, awesome trailer here), some searching around the web found some websites.  Given that JJ Abrams and his team at Bad Robot love web games and such, like those for Lost, it's no surprise that a bunch of websites tied into the movie were found.  I'm guessing they provide background on the characters, monster, etc.

The first to be found was Slusho.jp; Slusho, a "magic elixir" drink, is owned by Tagruato (a Japanese deep sea drilling company many think Rob is supposed to work for).  Did they unleash the monster via drilling?  Or did the Slusho secret ingredient create the monster?  Whatever it is, I think it's an interesting reversal of Godzilla, who was created by (I believe) American nuclear testing, then he attacked Japan.

Their website was recently hacked, which I understand happened during the Lost web experience.  Read about the hacking.  (By the way, Slusho made a cameo on Heroes; read about it here.)  Another site tied to Tagruato is boldfutura.jp, but the site goes up and down all the time.  I'm sure it's intentional, but I don't know what is has to do with everything else.

Then there's jamieandteddy.com (password is jllovesth), which features a girl talking to her boyfriend in pre-recorded webcam movies.  I think I saw this girl in the teaser, but not the full trailer.  She speaks of Teddy working for the cause, which leads me to believe he (or his cause) hacked the Tagruato website.

Lastly, there are the characters' MySpace pages:

http://www.myspace.com/jamielascano
http://www.myspace.com/robbyhawkins
http://www.myspace.com/beth_mcintyre
http://www.myspace.com/lily_ford
http://www.myspace.com/hudsonplatt
http://www.myspace.com/marlenadiamond
http://www.myspace.com/jj_hawkins

I'm not sure what else we'll glean from these, but so far it provides a small background on the characters.  Also, check out cloverfieldnews.com and cloverfieldclues.com for news and rumors on the movie.

Posted at 08:27AM Nov 26, 2007 by Heath McKnight in Entertain  |  Comments[0]