Monday, January 21, 2008

Random Cloverfield Question

I saw Cloverfield over the weekend, and while I am not going to give away any spoilers, I have a simple question that anyone can answer just from seeing a preview or commercial. Although we do not know for sure, let’s assume that the monster came from the water and is rather large, based on the fact that he/she/it beheaded the Statue of Liberty. So why would the monster choose Manhattan over anywhere else?

I’m not an expert on New York City geography, so please correct me if I’m wrong. So you’re telling me that the monster goes from the Lower New York Bay to the Upper New York Bay to Manhattan with no one noticing until he/she/it announces its arrival by decapitating the Statue of Liberty? How deep is the water there? Wouldn’t the monster take out a few bridges along the way? Wouldn’t it be much easier for the monster just to attack New Jersey, Long Island or Connecticut? If the monster prefers colder water, it could attack Maine or Nova Scotia. Florida, Georgia or South Carolina would be much more convenient for a warmer climate.

Maybe the monster did some research and figured that New York would be the best place to attack based on its population and proximity to the water. However, by that logic, the Mumbai Metropolitan Area, which consists of the metropolis of Bombay and its satellite towns, would be a much better target. (I'm not an expert on Mumbai either, so please correct me if I'm wrong.) The population of Mumbai and New York City is similar, but the monster should have an easier time navigating and destroying Mumbai since it is much smaller in terms of square kilometers (according to Wikipedia, the area of New York city is 17,884 square km while Mumbai is 2,350).

Am I over thinking this?

6 comments:

Scotus said...

"Why New York?" is apparently revealed in the very last scene. The spoiler is all over the Internet for anyone who wants to Google it, but it seems like it was just dumb luck.

As for the question of NY geography, I'm no expert, either, but yeah, I think the monster was underwater when it caused the initial tremor and the tanker to capsize, emerged to knock the head off the Statue of Liberty, and then headed into the city.

Archi said...

I went to NBC.com to watch an episode of Heroes that I had missed, and it showed me the same commercial for that damn movie 7 times during the episode. The one where one of the characters says something like, "We can die here, we can die in a tunnel, or we can die on the streets."

Needless to say, after the 7th viewing, I was ready to knock them all off to save them the trouble of making a choice.

Sean said...

"Why New York? is apparently revealed in the very last scene."

I guess I missed that entirely.

Sean said...

Dan - I guess I didn't see enough of the commercials, so I was somewhat intrigued by the movie. Now I do feel like I saw too many commercials for the Bucket List and 27 Dresses.

Christopher Chambers said...

The monster came from the water b/c he landed in the water. If you look at the end of the movie where the recorded-over stuff was playing--the dude and his girl at Coney Island--as they are on a ferris wheel or whatever just in the distance, maybe miles from the beach in the clouds, you see some fall out of the sky and splash in the ocean. We can only assume that was the creature, or maybe add water and you get monster?

Sean said...

Thanks Christopher. I completely missed that. So if that is the case, why did the monster wait about a month between landing in the ocean and going into Manhattan?