See It My Way
Cloverfield, the low-budget monster hit, is reminiscent of many others films, though most people are reminded of The Blair Witch Project--both are self-filmed stories of a small crew traveling into danger. (And all that herky-jerky camera movement gives you a headache if you sit up close like I do.)
But I was reminded most of 2005's War Of The Worlds. Spielberg's stated goal was to show a huge catastrophe from a small, threatened group's limited point of view. I didn't think Cloverfield was entirely successful, but I thought it succeeded in this goal better than Spielberg managed.
posted by LAGuy @ 1:07 AM
3 Comments:
I just saw I Am Legend - world disaster seen from one person's point of view. They used some herky-jerky camera work as well, and I think this is effective in making the audience feel part of the action. of course, it gives you a headache after a while.
Another technique in I Am Legend is filming in utter darkness. This was used in Blair Witch, but I haven't seen Cloverfield so I don't know if it is used there. I felt it went on too long in I Am Legend - sure it was scary - to hear sounds and not se what was going on, but after a while I lost interest in looking at the screen.
Can you compare I Am Legend to Omega Man (Charleton Heston's version o fthe same story), which I have not seen?
I Am Legend is not quite the subjective experience of War Of The Worlds or Cloverfield. In the two latter films, we follow the leads and are in as great a state of ignorance as they are as to what's actually happening. In I Am Legend not only does the lead character know what's going on, he was one of the guys who was in charge of what was going on. And we have flashbacks where we're shown just how the world got into this situation. We follow the story from his point of view not exactly as an artistic choice, but because he's allegedly the only point of view around.
I liked Omega Man but I haven't seen it in years--decades really. I have no idea how it would hold up. Both politics and special effects have changed a lot since the 70s. I also liked The Last Man On Earth when I was a kid.
For years Arnold Schwarzenegger was attached to the I Am Legend script. I'm sorry he never got to make it.
Apart from its general 1970s feeling of "everything is falling apart and you can't do a thing about it" angst, I think The Omega Man holds up pretty well. The Omega Man was a seminal piece in Charlton Heston's series of movies about how incredibly bad the future will be- Here he was the only man left on Earth, in others the world was so populated, you couldn't walk down stairways (Soylent Green) or was run by gorillas, chimps and orangutans (Planet of the Apes). No wonder he wanted to make sure he had a right to his guns.
The Last Man on Earth contains some of my favorite lines- "I used to enjoy eating, now its just fuel to keep going"
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