New York Monster Mash
destroying new york city to shock audiences
New Yorkers have plenty to worry about while living in the city: muggings, shootings, asteroids, and giant apes. At least, they do according to some of the recent movies released, which follow in a tradition of many films that begin or end with Manhattan in ashes.
It has once again become popular to set cinematic New York ablaze. The most recent episode is the monster flick Cloverfield, produced by Lost and Alias creator, J.J. Abrams. The film tracks an amateur video (a la The Blair Witch Project) shot by a small group of friends trying to escape Manhattan while the city is attacked by a mysterious monster.
Cloverfield is not the only recent film to take on the city’s destruction. In I Am Legend, Will Smith stars as the last man alive in New York, wandering through a desolate and empty city after a virus wipes out the rest of humanity. The first season of the TV hit Heroes shows a future in which a nuclear bomb destroys the city. The Day after Tomorrow and Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake are other recent hits that have presented an imperiled New York City.
The history of cinematic attacks on Manhattan goes back to Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 King Kong, featuring the giant ape’s famous climb to the top of the Empire State Building. In the 1976 remake, Kong rides to the top of the Twin Towers, while the unfortunately terrible Godzilla remake by Roland Emmerich in 1998 also features a colossal monster taking over the city.
Other visions of the city present a dystopian New York that has already been destroyed. Who can forget the final image of Planet of the Apes as Charlton Heston falls to his knees on the beach, staring up at the half-buried Statue of Liberty? Or John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, which depicts the city as a walled prison for 3 million criminals? The final moments of the Spielberg-directed Artificial Intelligence: AI create a similarly jarring effect as Haley Joel Osment travels around a flooded city, looking in awe at the ruins of a past generation.
But even as Michael Bay smashes the city’s landmarks with his asteroids in Armageddon, the question lingers: why do filmmakers love laying waste to the city that never sleeps? The answer comes in many forms. Perhaps all of us secretly hope to witness the city in ruins. Each one of us could hope to be Will Smith, walking around New York City without hundreds in the way. Anyone could appreciate the irony of Escape from New York, as many of us already consider the city to be overrun with criminals. But another popular theory on why filmmakers tear the city apart is the symbolism: New York encompasses all America. Show some small suburban street in ruins and audiences will never feel the punch. Show one shot of New York as a complete wasteland, and a viewer might think that the entire nation or even all of human civilization has fallen.
Yet now filmmakers have a new question to deal with: How far can we take it before New Yorkers feel like they are reliving an unforgettable day from seven years ago? Immediately after Sept. 11, New York’s destruction was taboo—Men in Black 2 had to completely re-shoot an ending that featured the World Trade Center, and producers delayed a remake of The Time Machine by six months for a scene in which meteors fall all over the city. But with the release of Sept. 11 films from Hollywood studios, it seems that the sensitive time has come and gone. New York is once again vulnerable to attack from filmmakers.
Almost seven years later, Cloverfield tries to tackle post-Sept. 11 anxiety straight on. Director Matt Reeves has said that the style was heavily influenced by the amateur videos shot on Sept. 11. Although The Day After Tomorrow and I Am Legend have torn New York apart, Cloverfield will be the first post-Sept. 11 film to really try to get under the skin of the audience. One early scene in Cloverfield shows characters walking around covered in dust, a direct reference to the news coverage shown on CNN after the attacks. Other sequences, showing explosions and toppled buildings, also feel just a bit too reminiscent.
That feeling may not last long, with a monster running around. Still, just a few moments of déjà vu say enough. With a record-setting box office take in January, Cloverfield is a huge success. So with New York destroyed once again, how about a filmmaker destroys Philadelphia or Chicago?