On the outset, I promise there will be no pictures of my family or anything I’ve personally been up to lately in this post. Not one.
That said, for a while I’ve been thinking about writing something more about movies. Sadly, this has been an intention for almost a month, since back when I saw Transformers and wanted to write something positive about it. At this point, there’s not much that needs to be said about that movie other than, “See it if you haven’t, even if you know nothing about the cartoon or the toys. You don’t need to; it’s all self-contained, and it’s just big, noisy fun.”
Moving on.
I’m taking some time again to highlight another few rather interesting-looking movies that are on the way. Also, in the interest of more brevity than I’ve shown lately, I’ll make it a series of bite-sized posts, focusing on one movie a day for a few days. If I’m guessing correctly, these should be pretty unfamiliar to most everyone out there.
For today, though, if you did see Transformers, this first one should ring a bell. It hasn’t even been given an official title yet–at least not publicly. With an earlier codename of “Cloverfield,” and currently known as 1-18-08 (which also happens to be the movie’s release date), it’s the latest brainchild from producer J.J. Abrams (creator/writer/producer/director of Lost and Alias, writer/director of MI:III, and producer/director of the upcoming Star Trek movie in late 2008).
The teaser trailer doesn’t show much, but between that and various bits of speculation online, at least two things seem to be likely. It is a monster/disaster movie. And it is shot first-person in a handheld-camera, Blair Witch sort of style. Check out the teaser for yourself: HD here, regular Quicktime options here.
Okay, now that you’ve watched that, you might want to check out that official website, which currently doesn’t offer much other than a few pictures you can move around. Other sites that seem tied to the movie include EthanHaasWasRight and The Truth of Ethan Haas (aka, Ethan Haas Was Wrong). If you take the time to figure out the puzzles on the former, you’ve done more than I have. I’ll probably go back and try again, but if you want a quick method through, there’s help here.
One thing is for sure: this film’s marketing group is fairly brilliant, though they should feed people a few more crumbs pretty soon or they’ll start getting annoyed with the lack of info. The marketing so far has the familiar tang of an Alternate Reality Game, and that seems likely given that Abrams has utilized them before (remember The Lost Experience?). However, as cool as ARGs can be, they do need to move along. Most people have been expecting some extra info coming from J.J. Abrams’ appearance at the San Diego Comic-Con this week, but so far, there hasn’t been anything other than the release of the first official one-sheet (movie poster).
Larger view here.
Regardless of what this is or what is going on, if Abrams is involved, I’m interested. The mysterious trailer and unique marketing scheme don’t hurt, either. Whatever 1-18-08 turns out to be, it should be, at the very least, intriguing.
Back tomorrow (hopefully) with Coming Soon, Part 2!
Edit and Update: Okay, I worked my way through those puzzles on that Ethan Haas site, only to find a discussion on that help site I also linked to that indicates that the Haas sites have nothing to do with 1-18-08/Cloverfield. Nice bit of going astray there, but as I’m not by a long shot the only person taken in by this, I don’t feel too badly about it. On the upside, in the process of all this, I did run across a different site that looks quite a bit more helpful. Check it out if you’re interested.
So what think you of this new Abrams film, and of abovementioned puzzles? (I’m still not entirely convinced that this isn’t one of his projects.) It reminds me of the hype surrounding AI and Minority Report, with an internet-based game preceding the release of the film (I experienced a little déjà vu when I saw the embedded movies). But do you think that it’s going to be shot in first person, Blair Witch-style; or that this is still more brilliant marketing from the Abrams camp? Regardless, the graphics work in those posters is pretty impressive.
This one has me really interested as well. I believe that the Ethan Haas site does in fact have something to do with the movie, I suspect it’s just part of the marketing that they are saying this isn’t part of it. I have two reasons for it, first if you look up the DNS information for both sites you’ll find that both have some unique phone numbers that the DNS is registered too (very odd prerecorded voice messages). In addition, check the date registration, the domain name was registered before anyone had heard of 1-18-08, if this isn’t a technically official site for the movie it was at least started by someone who was more or less in on the project.
There’s also a number of other sites that could be related to the movie, tons of speculation all over the web and some pretty crazy rumors. As to the official website for the movie there are some weird clues. In the image of the two face look at the shadows between them, also notice that it’s the same face that’s been split, color corrected and moved. I recombined them at some point, but didn’t save the info, I’d be glad to do it again if you’re interested.
There’s three of us in the office that have spent a couple of lunch breaks getting into this.
Hey dude. Again, I am ariving late to the conversation, but one thing I’ve discovered just recently (which I’m not many others have) os that if you play around with the photos on 1-18-08.com, you can flip them around. Two of the photos have messages on the back. After looking at the messages, I found that apparently these characters all have MySpace pages and I would assume Facebook pages (I haven’t checked, yet). I’ve tried adding them as friends, but they haven’t approved me yet. Kinda interesting…