Autopsy Report: Theories on Cloverfield (INCLUDES SPOILERS)
by Tom Burns

ENDING OPTION #1 - The Blair Godzilla Project

The handheld home-video look of Cloverfield is obviously going to inspire a lot of comparisons to The Blair Witch Project, but it might also end up resembling the BWP in terms of story as well. Our heroes are five people with a camera versus a 90-foot titan. What chance do they have to survive? We've got the sneaking feeling that the whole movie will unfold not unlike the BWP - the friends venture into a dangerous environment, struggle to survive, keep getting glimpses of a monster they never really see clearly, get into a really nasty deadly situation, and... FADE TO BLACK. Keep in mind that the trailers for Cloverfield open with the Blair Witchy claim that the whole movie is found footage - "Camera Retrieved at Incident Site U.S. 447. Area Formerly Known as 'Central Park.'" "Formerly known"? That doesn't sound good.

We're guessing that Robby (and maybe Beth) survives until the very end and then either the battery dies or the camera is destroyed right before the Cloverfield creature roars through Central Park and makes our heroes stand in the corner.

DIAGNOSIS: Yeah, it's dark (not as dark as The Mist, but dark nonetheless), but it's probably the most likely scenario for how Cloverfield is going to end. If the director wimps out, though, we might get a videotaped coda starring Robby and Beth, all patched up and living happily together in Japan - "You guys found my camera? Wow, that was a crazy night."

ENDING OPTION #2 - Cloverfield's War of the Worlds (the Tom Cruise version)

In this scenario, our heroes barely escape the monster's carnage while trying to make their way to a specific goal (like saving Beth). They see death all around them, lose some friends, maybe run into a crazy Tim Robbins, and have a few close scrapes with the creature before they just happen to witness the monster's final demise, either at the hands of the military or a really nasty flu bug. In the end, most of the protagonists (at least, the more photogenic ones) reach their goal and reunite with family members that really, really should be dead. We mean, honestly, the kid ran right at the Tripod... ahem... creature. Dakota Fanning smiles. Fade to black.

DIAGNOSIS: The only reason we're entertaining this one as a viable option is that the Blair Witch ending is much, much darker than we've seen J.J. Abrams go before. The nihilistic "everybody dies" ending could've been too much (and a hard sell to the studios), so there's a definite chance (albeit unlikely) that Abrams went with the "almost everyone dies and we totally get to see the monster get its comeuppance" ending.

ENDING OPTION #3 - Matthew Broderick and Hank Azaria star in Cloverfield 1998!

This option revolves around the crazy notion (that we secretly love) that Cloverfield is really a low-budget tribute to Roland Emmerich's camp classic Godzilla. They're both about giant monsters stepping out in Manhattan, right? For this ending to work, our heroes would secretly need to discover the monster's fatal weakness and then engage the behemoth in a wacky taxi chase down Broadway, leading the beast to the Brooklyn Bridge where the altruistic military shows the monster how Americans really feel about illegal aliens nowadays. Close-up on the creature's sad sympathetic eyes, cross-cut to one last undiscovered monster egg, hatching a cute Cloverfield clone, and we smell "sequel"!

DIAGNOSIS: Yeah, that's not going to happen.

ENDING OPTION #4 - Cloverfield: Japanese Kaiju Weirdness Edition

If Abrams' passion for Godzilla movies inspired Cloverfield, then you almost wish that the director would embrace the Gojira genre whole hog. Yes, Japanese monster movies are about titans the size of skyscrapers battling it out, stomping on model cars and cardboard cities as they fight for dominance, but they're also about the best in freaky Japanese surrealism. When we watch the Cloverfield trailer, all we can think is - where are the black holes, the twin telepathic fairies, and the inappropriate light pop soundtracks that we've all come to love when watching Godzilla, Rodan, or Mothra throwdown? If Cloverfield was a TRUE Godzilla descendant, Miley Cyrus and Roxette should be doing the soundtrack, and the monster should battle an irradiated Statue of Liberty, Ghostbusters 2-style, down the streets of Midtown. In this scenario, the Cloverfield creature would ultimately be blinded by the Statue's Torch of Liberty and retreat to beneath the East River, waiting until the Gods called him to cleanse the Big Apple once more.

DIAGNOSIS: It didn't really look like the Statue of Liberty was "fighting" the Cloverfield creature in the trailers, so this one's a long shot. But it never hurts to dream, dammit!

FINAL DIAGNOSIS: If we had to put money down, we'd say that calling Cloverfield the "Blair Godzilla Project" is probably a pretty safe bet. Blair Witch drew in hordes of moviegoers with its unique take on the horror genre, and the producers of Cloverfield probably (and, we're guessing, correctly) assumed that the same thing would work for monster movies too. When you limit the storytelling point-of-view in a movie with such an epic premise, it raises the emotional stakes, to be sure, but it also really limits what you can do. Our heroes are basically there to witness what's happening and, in terms of action, they can flee, fall, or fight, and that's about it. And since five Manhattan hipsters versus Godzilla would be the most one-sided battle since the big guy took on Bambi, that only leaves flee (escape) or fall (die), and the found footage premise of the movie is definitely making us assume that there's nothing lucky about Cloverfield for Robby and his crew of monster-fodder friends.