Cloverfield - What the Hell Is It?

Note: this post is my best attempt at making some sense of this movie and tying together as many loose ends as possible, by researching the internet and filling in blanks with my best guess, so for people like me who saw the movie and had a lot of questions, this might be your thing - for folks who haven't seen it yet and just want the general flavor, this is not a movie review.

I saw the "JJ Abrams Production" trailer last Fall, thought it was cool, and then forgot about it till shortly after the movie came out, when I overhead some people talking about it (full disclosure: the "people" I overheard were other World of Warcraft players) and remembered why it sounded familiar. After that I got completely caught up in the E-buzz, saw the movie, and then spent lots and lots of time playing the "game"; I googled like never before looking for images of the Cloverfield monster, the parasites, anything I could find on the movie.

Since then I've caught myself lying awake at night thinking about it, and decided enough is enough, so I'm going to put down my best shot at making sense of it all and tying it together in hopes of getting it out of my head:

Wild Cloverfield Speculations

Cloverfield Origin

First and foremost it should be kept in mind that the design of Cloverfield and his parasites emphasized form over substance, per their lead creature designer Neville Page (“make it cool first then justify it later”), and I think everything about the movie proceeds from there.

What we do know about Cloverfield is that he is a newborn baby, who had previously been in a gestative state at the bottom of the sea for “thousands and thousands of years”. His motivation for attacking Manhattan? He is confused, frightened, angry, and itchy.

Physiologically he is around 250 feet tall, bipedal with two long primary arms and a smaller pair of secondary arms tucked in around his lower abdomen, a nasty fishlike face with some kind of breathing bladder on the back of his head and a flattened tail which [may indicate] an evolution from something more fishlike/aquatic, according to Page.

So, was he terrestrial or extraterrestrial? While the designers were careful not to commit 100% either way, I’m betting on terrestrial; not only did Neville Page seem to lean heavily in this direction, the only comments even potentially suggesting otherwise are Matt Reeves’ references to the falling object at the end of the movie; I’m not sure what his intentions were in emphasizing that but don’t think he was suggesting some kind of an “alien crash landing” background as that would be inconsistent with the declaration that Clover had been in the ocean for “thousands and thousands of years”, above.

(That said, I wouldn’t put it past JJ to still go with the alien origin in Cloverfield 2, just to throw fans a curveball – that would be in keeping with his style in Lost).

However going with the terrestrial origin does raise more questions namely “when and where would the species first appear” and “how would it have lived”?

There are a few hints suggesting that cloverfields have always lived in (or under) the deep sea, suggesting something a bit like “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, where fantastic creatures have lived in deep places undiscovered for untold millennia.

Personally I favor something a little more integrated with the known world (not because it’s more plausible but because I think it’s cooler), so here’s my spin: going from the Hasbro toy model you can see that it has (almost) nothing in the way of really obvious tools for aquatic living; I see just the very traces of webbing between its fingers and toes, and no fins beyond the slight protrusions on the sides of its (not very long) tail – the one real exception here is the “breather bag” on the back of its head.

Since it wouldn’t be much of a swimmer, the best it could really hope for then in the way of catching a meal underwater would be to maybe dig a (really big) hole, cover itself up, and try to grab passing fish/sharks/whales/etc with its insanely long primary arms. Not very likely though – the creatures who do this kind of thing tend to be flattened for easier concealment e.g. crabs, rays, flounder etc, and not ginormous gangly upright things like Clover.

More likely then Clover belongs to a species of giant amphibians whose heyday was back in the age of the dinosaurs, when they would lurk just offshore and grab large prey that came too close to the water’s edge – there were lots of big things to eat back then, and Clover’s mantis/bat-like primary arms are among his most obviously specialized features so I can’t think of a better application for them than that. Being amphibious they could also make short dashes from the water if needed, like a massive crocodile.

This would explain them being 99% suited to hunting on or near land with the ability to hang out under water while sleeping, mating or otherwise waiting for the next meal to come walking by (which is also the only place something that large could exist for any real length of time, incidentally, without super-thick legs to support it – although there may be more to it than that). Being incredibly large and tough they probably were also capable of trudging along the ocean floor, and I imagine them making trips in this manner to the deepest parts of the ocean when spawning or in the final years of their life (returning to their instinctive spawning place).

So why weren’t any fossils found? Fossil locations are found in places where animals die, and something that large and tough probably couldn’t be killed by anything else, which would limit potential remains to the extreme ocean depths (any killed by their own species likewise would have been dragged far down for later consumption).

Slusho/Tagruato

Here is where we get into the pre-1/18 viral marketing. What was Slusho and what was its connection to Clover? At the Slusho site they relate the story of how the parent company CEO Ganu Yoshida discovered a fluid on the ocean floor that was “near frozen” and under “amazing pressure”; this stuff has all kinds of amazing properties most notably of making people ecstatically happy, and became the base ingredient for Slusho, called “Seabed’s Nectar”. This seems to have occurred in 1989, when “a brilliant young engineer named Ganu Yoshida was in search of an avenue to support his off-shore drilling revelations” and took over the ailing Tagruato Corporation, backed by a team of investors (the company is described as having its “main focus” on “deep sea Petroleum excavation”, but this sounds like an early sop to investors while Tagruato explored various profitable uses for Deepsea’s Nectar such as Slusho and biomedical applications, and ParafFUN wax which appears to be a kind of nectar/petroleum fusion).

The first such rig was Jimmu Station, built in Japan’s Inland Sea in 1991. Thirteen more have been built since, the latest being Chuai Station, located in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and going into operation in 2007.

Shortly afterward January 08 is a busy month; we learn that Seabed’s Nectar gains approval from the “AFA” (a sometime stand-in for the FDA), and that Ganu himself has come to New York to discuss the distribution of Slusho into the US via “pre-established public waterways”. Furthermore the Chuai Station is destroyed under mysterious circumstances that are blamed on a random eco-terrorist group, and tankers are going missing en route to New York (according to the translation of the Japanese report), and finally, early in the movie we learn on the news cast that the last one capsized in New York Harbor just prior to Cloverfield’s rampage.

Sifting through this jumble of info-bits you get the sense that Deepsea’s Nectar is a kind of super-enriched amniotic fluid (in particular note the comments re: its effects on puppies and kittens – “Kittens love Slusho! It reminds them of mother’s milk!”, and also the description of Ganu’s dream at Slusho wherein a whale (i.e. mommy-Cloverfield) tells him to drink the Deepsea’s Nectar and in doing so he himself grows to great size) secreted back in the age of the dinosaurs by a mommy-Cloverfield to contain her embryo(s). The extreme cold and pressure could have helped the stuff last over time, and there are also clues strongly suggesting it was covered over (“There are great reservoirs under the ocean floor that no one can get to due to obstruction by physical elements”), which would be necessary to protect it from hungry deep sea critters and which would in turn also necessitate active drilling to reach it.

Given that this was going on since 1989, it seems likely that many Cloverfield nests exist in our seas and oceans (it doesn’t say which rigs are devoted to petroleum and which to nectar, though we know Chuai and likely Jimmu at minimum are for nectar extraction), hidden beneath the seabed where they remained undetected until Ganu reached them with his advanced techniques and equipment (“This groundbreaking feat of industrial triumph allows for research and retrieval in areas previously unexplored by man”). However as Tagruato sought to increase production output, making “each [rig] more efficient and productive than the last”, it also caused more and more disturbance at the drill sites, finally resulting in sufficient commotion to awaken the nest’s occupant at the latest rig, Chuai Station.

From there, Clover destroyed the rig and followed the tankers that were carrying away its amniotic fluid to their destination in New York (presumably it was able to track the stuff thru the water by smell, the way a shark smells blood), where it threw a big tantrum on discovering that the Statue of Liberty was NOT Mommy (probably the last straw at that point).

Cloverfield Parasites

These are “parasites”, and therefore not some sort of offspring or otherwise related to Clover. They are eight legged, four eyed, chitinous things about the size of a dog, with a snout like an animal trap and the ability to survive long falls unhurt by folding up into a spindle. The best picture I’ve managed to find so far is a modelling clay sculpture here.

Shed by Clover as he makes his way about New York, they scuttle around and serve mainly to keep the sense of threat ever-present by denying humans any sanctuary; not only can they reach you wherever you hide, they can even get inside you by way of their peculiar saliva/venom, which is administered through a bite and can cause you to later explode if enough of the stuff gets into you (the brief view of the soldier on the gurney shows the end result to be the evacuation of the torso/abdominal area by the way and not an exploding head).

Now how exactly does that effect work? Is it some kind of gas or chemical reaction, and if so to what purpose – simply killing the victim, or is death the byproduct of making the victim easier to consume? Or is it some form of reproduction a la Aliens?

There is no definite answer to this since Marlena meets her end behind a tarp, however we can find some clues in the comments of Abrams and Page, where the parasites are described as flea-like and causing Clover skin irritation.

To succeed as a flea on something like a cloverfield, you would need a very specialized means of feeding off of it. After all if Clover’s hide can stop tank rounds, bombs and RPGs, you aren’t just going to be able to latch on and expect to get any blood or digestible material with a simple bite – you need something like the anti-coagulant of a flea or mosquito.

We know that the anti-coagulant of the above critters does indeed cause the itching described by Abrams, so proceeding on that assumption we could assume Marlena exploded due to a massive super-hemorrhage (I’m no medical student, but “hemorrhage” is described by www.thefreedictionary.com as “Excessive discharge of blood from the blood vessels; profuse bleeding”, which does seem to fit with the idea of an anti-coagulant – and you can’t get more “excessive” than what happened to poor Marlena). This theory is further supported by the fact she was bleeding from the eyes as well as the nose and mouth just prior to blowing up, and the only thing I know of that can cause that kind of bleeding is a massive increase in blood pressure.

So, adding all that together I think the parasite bite effect is most likely caused by a monster-strength anti-coagulant in the parasite’s saliva, and is not a means of reproduction.

But where would the parasites come from and why haven’t they been seen before – not even fossil remains? Well if you go with the idea of cloverfields as shoreside lurkers, then it follows that these bugs would be all over the place, so the only way to avoid fossil remains would be if their hardest parts were a kind of cartillage i.e. nothing hard enough to stay around long enough for fossilization. This would help explain why they were able to survive the 200+ foot fall from Clover’s back, as well as being in-line with Page’s comments on the parasites being “thin and vertical and light” AND for that matter would also explain why mere humans were able to squash them with clubs and axes.

I imagine the ones in the movie to have been trapped in the Deepsea’s Nectar, shed by Clover’s mom during the egg laying process the way fleas fall off animals every few seconds, and kept alive in a state of suspended animation by the same process that kept Clover alive all those years.

Cloverfield Resilience

How was Cloverfield able to survive hits from rockets, missiles, bombs, tank rounds and etc?

Being 250 feet tall, Clover has a lot of mass to absorb incoming damage. As far as I know this is way beyond the scale of anything we know today (the largest recorded whales were around 100 ft long, as were the largest recorded dinosaurs), and so the effects of conventional weaponry are a bit of an unknown here (and remember he is just a “baby” – an adult Cloverfield probably stands somewhere in the neighborhood of 500-1000 feet).

We do know that the military succeeded in hurting Clover, from Abrams’ comments about the critter being maddened by the stinging of our shells and rockets, and from the way it briefly collapsed after being carpet bombed near the end – and yet it never seemed to actually show any signs of bleeding or long term debilitation.

I’m thinking that the lack of bleeding was due to a super-powerful blood coagulating ability, something that actually seeded wounds with stem cells rather than just lots of interlocking platelets (giving the sealed wound the appearance of whole flesh) and which might have evolved in response to the super-anticoagulant in the saliva of their parasites.

It would also be inherently tough from being adapted to surviving extreme ranges of pressure in its journeys about the ocean floor – yes some deep sea creatures are soft and flabby, but that doesn’t mean something else couldn’t adapt by being super tough. This could include a lack of any gas or air pockets within its body, which are the most vulnerable to decompression and are minimized or omitted entirely by things living at extreme depths. Lacking those cavities would make it that much more resistant to punctures and concussions.

But probably the single most dramatic defense Clover possesses is at the cellular level – more than likely the properties found in Deepsea’s Nectar (“accelerated cell growth, increased strength, increased soft muscle tissue growth, sharper eyesight [and] better digestion”) persist within the creature itself, making it incredibly strong and resilient even for its size (which could explain not only its resilience but also why it can remain out of water for long periods of time, and defy the normal laws of physics mandating thicker legs for large land creatures).

All that being said, I do think the military could have taken it out – given enough time. But Clover denied them that opportunity with its mobility and ability to destroy anything shooting at it before the incoming firepower could focus and wear down its defenses.

And that's it. Needless to say I loved the movie and do hope they come out with a sequel (Aladgyma?); it would be cool to see more Cloverfields emerging, or more of the original one, whatever. While I wouldn't object much to another Blair Witch/camcorder style angle, I kind of would prefer something a little more classical -- the schtick worked great for me in Cloverfield 1 but doing it repeatedly might get old.

And hopefully no more of the viral marketing either.