This week marked the 10-year anniversary of the Cloverfield movie, at once a benchmark of the found footage genre and, perhaps even more importantly, an incomparable innovator in movie marketing. Just in time to capitalize on our nostalgia for Bad Robot’s cult favorite, we’ve gotten our first glimpse at the latest film in the Cloverfield “franchise”: God Particle. But if you thought this movie was going to hand over any details easily, you’ve probably been trapped in an underground bunker with John Goodman these last 10 years. Fortunately the internet has already deciphered this code-laden first look for us, and it seens like we might all be meeting even bigger and scarier monsters than we’ve seen thus far.
So far very little about the third Cloverfield movie is known, not even the real title. J.J. Abrams is still involved as a producer, and this third entry is directed by Julius Onah, and the film’s synopsis on its IMDb page reads:
“After a scientific experiment aboard the space station involving a particle accelerator has unexpected results, the astronauts find themselves isolated. Following their horrible discovery, the space station crew must fight for survival.”
Aside from that description, which, considering the franchise we aren’t even fully convinced will prove reliable, we haven’t seen any images or trailers, and its release date (now listed as April 20 this year) has been pushed back multiple times. But thanks to Jacob Suggs on Twitter we became aware that the website for the fictional Japanese ocean mining company Tagruato has suddenly been overtaken by an “error” page that never manages to upload.
If you’re anti-city-destroying monsters, that can’t be a good sign. Good luck if you want to try and decipher what is hidden in that jumble, but some of us prefer to rely on the sleuthing skills of the internet. Fortunately, Reddit has already cracked the code. Here’s the message they found, complete with typos and a lack of punctuation:
“Tokyo – January 18 2018 Tagruato has begun development on a revolutionary new energy technology In what Ceo Garo Yoshida called a technological great leap foreward for our planet This renewable technology will take at least 4 year to complete with along with another six years. International regulatory bodies to bring the powerful revolutionary energy source by April 18 2028.”
Considering the original (possibly even final) title of the film was reportedly “God Particle,” this “technological leap foreward [sic]” of renewable energy could be far more powerful than any of the scientists and engineers at the Tagruato company ever intended. Could that be what gives rise to an even bigger monster than in the first movie, or is this what is responsible for the plethora we saw at the end of 10 Cloverfield Lane? And is it possible the movie will be set in the future, after the technology has been completed and things have gone terribly wrong, which is how the astronauts get stranded? Are we going to see space monsters!?
The involvement of the Tagruato company goes back to the original film’s viral campaign, which featured a “real” news story from Connecticut about the mysterious destruction on one of the company’s oil rigs in the Atlantic. Without that IMDb synopsis we’d guess this means we were headed towards a return to Cloverfield’s Godzilla-like creature monster style, as as opposed to the smaller human monster story of the second. But if this story is set in space, this third film could be a hybrid of the first two.
Looking back on that new story, the Northeast probably should have been slightly more prepared for a giant monster to attack its biggest city. And now if the Tagruato company is playing god with powers they don’t fully understand and can’t control, it might not be safe anywhere. Not even if you leave the planet.
What do you make of this website? What do you think it tells us about the movie? Record your thoughts in our comments section below so someday survivors of this new attack can find them.
Images: Paramount Pictures
