Super 8 and Cloverfield: The Alien Connection

This weekend I saw Super 8, the newest from J.J. Abrams. As a Trekkie and devout fan of Bad Robot's Lost, I looked forward to this for a long time. The trailers seemed to be showing us the perfect mystery: weird stuff happens in a small town, just weird enough that it's probably something supernatural, yet not so weird that it only appeals to sci fi fans. The down-to-earth title says it's a human story about real people you'll want to watch for two hours, but there's also a big looming question that keeps your brain on the edge of its seat. In short, this movie looked like the second coming of Lost.

If you haven't seen Super 8 (and you plan to), close this tab now. Spoilers loom ahead!

Sure enough, the movie did have that sense of real-world adventure and human interest that made the first two seasons of Lost so endearing. In fact, the late 1970s setting made it feel like a great big flashback (especially for my nostalgic father, who actually experienced that period). But I was really surprised that Super 8 seemed eerily reminiscent (in one key aspect) of a different Bad Robot production: 2008's Cloverfield.

Now, Abrams has publicly announced, despite rumours to the contrary, that there is no connection between Super 8 and Cloverfield. That being said, I can't be the only one who found Super 8's alien surprisingly reminiscent of the city-crushing monster from Cloverfield.

Sure, there are obvious differences. Clover was a skyscraper-sized mindless monster with four limbs, whereas the Super 8 creature was an elephant-sized intelligent touch-telepathic engineer with six limbs. But despite those obvious differences, the guys at Bad Robot must have realized that after three years since Cloverfield, people's mental image of that monster would be blurry enough that they might get caught up in the similarity.

In a sense, that might actually be a stroke of genius. The last thing people expected to see in a movie like this is something similar to the director's last movie. We expect originality these days. Thus the Super 8 alien is a pretty brilliant construct. It's just similar enough to take us by surprise, but different enough to still be a distinctly different creature.

But then, please look at the similarities. These are both hunched (really quadrupedal) creatures, with slick, hairless skin, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, long arms and sharp claws. Moreover, they're both subterranean. This is explicitly stated in Super 8, and it's been revealed that Clover's emergence to terrorize New York was initiated by deep sea drilling by the Tagruato mining company.

But let's delve a little deeper. Upon close inspection, Super 8 actually hints at how we can account for the differences between the two monsters. Throughout the movie, the young heroes Joe and his friends are making a movie with the eponymous film technology. They talk about it constantly, we see them filming a couple of scenes (which kind of jump-starts the plot), and as the credits role, we see the film in its entirety. This movie within a movie is about zombies. Mindless, brain-eating, classic zombies. But this is 1979, not the modern world petrified by fear of AIDS and SARS and H1N1. These are not the virus-made zombies of 28 Days later or Resident Evil. These undead are the product of mutations induced by a chemical company's improperly disposed toxic waste.

Think about that. A pseudo-evil (or really environmentally irreverent) company dumps weird chemicals where they shouldn't, and level-headed people (or innocent animals, or whatever) become monsters. That's about the oldest classic monster B-movie cliché in the book. Even Godzilla went from lizard to lord of destruction because of fallout from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And didn't Abrams say that part of his intent with Cloverfield was to make a monster as iconic of New York as Godzilla is of Tokyo?

I think the connecting theory presents itself quite readily. The Super 8 alien, or another of its kind, comes to earth a little while later and sets down near New York City. (Because, you know, where better to study humanity than the setting of Law & Order: SVU?) Tagruato moves in and begins their drilling, maybe for oil deposits no one knew about, or maybe just to create a new hole in the ground in which to dump harmful mutagenic chemical byproducts. They unknowingly pollute the alien watcher's underground cottage, and, like the Super 8 zombies, the alien mutates into a ravenous killing machine, losing his capacity for rational thought and spaceship construction.

But that's just a hypothesis. It works in theory, but since it directly contradicts Abrams (or, as Tv Tropes would say, Word of God), it's unlikely to pan out. One has to wonder, though. Steven King famously ties many of his works together in a shared universe, and he's a known favourite of some key Bad Robot collaborators. Not the ones directly involved in Super 8, of course, but there's a connection at least.

And that, my friends, is what happens to the way you watch movies after six years of ceaselessly generating Lost theories.