CLOVERFIELD ending: Where was it and who saw what?

Call it the Zapruder Film of monster movies: right now the Internet is buzzing with discussion about what might have happened in the very last shot of Cloverfield, which opened yesterday.

I went to see Cloverfield yesterday afternoon, and last night I posted my review of it. It wasn't long afterward that an anonymous reader made the following intriguing comment...

In case you are wondering where the monster came from in the closing scene where it is one month previous and they are at the beach if you look out over the ocean in the distance an object (presumably the monster) falls from the sky and right as it hits the water the camera turns to beths face. This is the only hint that the director said he put in there as to where the monster/creature came from. If you are going to see it again this weekend look for that in the final scenes.

I didn't remember seeing anything like that when I watched Cloverfield, and I like to think that I'm a pretty attentive guy to details like that. Unless it was something so incredibly obscure, and I don't believe that J.J. Abrams and the Bad Robot guys would obfuscate so major a detail that much.

Then I started reading the blogosphere, and it turns out that other people are saying the same thing too: that in the final shot of Cloverfield, in the footage from Coney Island a month before the attack, that something huge and often described as "dark" lands in the ocean, just before Beth tells Rob that she had a good day.

It bugged me enough to decide that I wanted to see Cloverfield again. And today.

So a bit before noon, Lisa and I got in my car and we went to the Brassfield Cinemark on the northwest edge of Greensboro. After hearing me talk about it, she decided that she wanted to check out what the hullabaloo is about too. We got our tickets and went in and watched the movie. It was just as good a second time around, if not better. As for what Lisa thought about it, ummmm... she might write a review for her own blog, so I won't spoil her thoughts on it :-)

The final scene was approaching. I literally pried my eyelids open with my fingers, doing my darndest not to blink at all. I kept my peepers focused on the much-discussed right-hand side of the screen, looking at the sky and the water off Coney Island.

Okay, I must say: there is something there all right. But the only thing I saw, at all, was a large patch of white foam in the water, like the wake of something massive. I did not see a "big and dark" object fall out of the sky and hit the water. But there is something out there kicking up the surf off Coney Island. What that is, I don't know. But right now I'm not convinced at all that it was something that came falling out of the sky. Out in the water, it doesn't take much to make a plenty big enough wake.

So I personally did not see the "thing" from the sky. And yet, there are lots of people who are swearing quite vehemently that they did see something. If it's a delusion, it's one that's being shared by quite a large number of movie goers this weekend.

At the same time I'm also hearing from other people who reported that they looked for this, but didn't see the falling object either.

Curiouser and curiouser...

A few problems I have with this, if it is indeed supposed to be the arrival of the Cloverfield monster. For one thing, Coney Island was a month before the night of Rob's party: what was the monster doing during all of that time? The more obvious question in my mind though is that if the monster was that enormous, then how in the world did its crashing into the water not get noticed by not only Rob and Beth, but by everyone else at Coney Island? I mean, if a skyscraper came hurtling out of the blue and into the ocean off-shore from a major amusement park, it seems like somebody would have taken note of it, right?

In light of how many people claim to have seen something fall out of the sky and into the water, and how many claim to have seen nothing at all, I have to wonder: is it at all possible that on some prints of Cloverfield there is a falling object, and it's deliberately missing on others copies? Cloverfield has already arrived at the box office after months of staggering hype fueled by massive speculation on the Internet. Would it really be past Abrams and Reeves and the rest of Bad Robot - the same gang that gave us Lost and Alias, mind ya - to do something this devious with the final film itself, so as to "pour gasoline" on the already out-of-control wildfire that is Cloverfield?

What if some prints of Cloverfield have the monster crashing into the water, and other prints of the movie don't show it at all? It would then become a game of wondering which theaters have which prints of the film.

Hey, Clue did something like this way back in 1986, with multiple endings (I think there were 3 or 4 different endings and which one you saw depended on which theater you went to). It was quite an innovative gimmick at the time. Maybe that's what's up with Cloverfield.

Okay so, now I'm hoping someone else will write in and tell me: what did you see at the end of Cloverfield? Where and when did you see it exactly, too: was it at the very beginning of the final bit of the Coney Island footage, or is it elsewhere in that scene?

I guess I'll have to see this again sometime soon (hey, another reason to play tricks with the ending, eh? :-)