Five Minutes of Cloverfield

Don't expect too much-- it's just an uninterrupted sequence of shots you've seen before in all the other trailers.

While I'm not as interested in this as I first was, there is at least some reassurance here that the hand-held camera won't be all that distracting. It's not as nauseatingly shaky as the camera in the Blair Witch Project.

Thanks to The Influence Peddler, swiped from AICN.

Opening tonight is I Am Legend, which is getting a lot of surprisingly good reviews (though also a lot of bad reviews; it's clocking in just barely under "Fresh" at Rotten Tomatoes). Here's a long trailer for that.

No "Ohhh, hell's no!" yet spotted, which means someone on this site loses a bet.

Stupid: Everyone's saying it's too dependent on CGI. For the backdrop I expected that. But just for the monsters, which are just vampires? Why do we need CGI for vampires?

These humanoids made by CGI and motion-capture technology are annoyingly fake creatures that add a risible element to an otherwise overly serious epic.

Why?

High Praise From NRO... Except For The CGI Monsters: What were they thinking?

If anything, it’s the action scenes that fail. In the middle of the shoot, Lawrence decided that his human zombies weren’t scary enough, and he got extra funds from the studio to beef them up with a hearty helping of monster-CGI. One almost wishes the studio had simply declines and used the money to throw some seven-figure birthday parties for their top execs. The difference in the creatures is marked, but not in a positive manner. Now, instead of merely seething and bearing their teeth, their faces contort and bubble as if every one of them is an undead Jim Carrey from The Mask. They move in packs and swarms that are suspiciously similar to those of the automatons that Smith fought off in I, Robot, as if the CGI artists simply recycled the same algorithm, but set for “zombie” rather than “robot.” Perhaps the original baddies weren’t terribly frightening, but these hardly provide the necessary menace. Every time the showed up on screen, I found myself wishing that Smith would simply go back to strolling around New York and talking to his dog.

posted by Ace at 02:14 PM

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