unforum

[diablopath]

My theory on the remains:
During the tunnel attack scene, Hud had mentioned that the SEATs were dragging him away.
Maybe they y'know, drag their shit somewhere else?
This is something common with many animals, I see my pet do it frequently.
So maybe the corspes on the streets were cleared and moved by the SEATs. Not necessarily to EAT 'em, but y'know, just one of those weird animal things?

As far the debris/air clearing fast...that was probably done just as a way to move the movie along faster.

I like some of your other remarks though, especially Clovie's body shielding them from the blast. Sounds neat.

(Also, the only thread on this site I have read thoroughly is this one...What does MGB stand for? I got RVN and SEAT (a favorite of mine :p) down.)

[lazarusHART]

It's MGP, not MGB.

It's a name we gave to the monster a LONG time ago. Mr Grumpy Pants

[tMan930]

Mister Grumpy Butt?

[cysubtor]

[OliMango]

[The Stray]

Re: Military oddities and everything else......

[TP516]

regarding the involvement of the extras/citizens...

I must disagree with you.

I think it was extremely realistic.

of course I would get scared too but if you're crossing a bridge, what do you expect people do? There will be a couple of crazy scary ones but I have to imagine that a percentage of these people don't know what's going on or haven't seen the monster yet.

are they scared? I'm sure.

in real life, does EVERYONE go APE SHIT if an evacuation occurs? No.

the Japanese reactions in "Godzilla" are not realistic. go back and watch the footage of post 911. sure people freaked out but there is video of citizens strolling around... waiting around, to check out the damage. a lot of people in fact

many of us want to ASSUME that the city of New York would go crazy but I actually think that's unrealistic.

and besides that, there ARE people that go crazy. after the monster attacks the bridge, people in the city start running and screaming and begin looting.

while the production crew could have made it more realistic (but don't forget it IS hollywood, folks) I don't think the background reactions are the thing we should be arguing about..?

I thought it was realistic. Those stereotypical old monster movie reactions are NOT.

[The Stray]

[lazarusHART]

[diablopath]

[jamman1]

[OliMango]

[tMan930]

Nested Quooooooooootes!!!

[tkip]

Well, about panic during an evacuation....

[MercenaryMuffin]

Okay...

*cracks knuckles*

First of all, let me say this: I have served in the US Army (3 years), as a 19 Kilo, M1A2 Abrams Crewman out of Fort Knox and Fort Hood. I've seen combat in Iraq, I know how the military (well, the Army, anyway) works, what its methods are, what it would do in a similar situation (say, another terrorist attack).

So with that in mind, bare with me, as this post my be long.

Alright, the big thing everyone is discussing is the fact that the majority of the people we see are walking with the military in a calm, orderly fashion. This is more realistic than most of you are giving it credit for.

In a real-world situation where the public might be prone to terror and confusion, there is one rule you try to enforce as quickly as possible: KEEP EVERYONE CALM.

If people are running around in fits of terror, trampling over each other, and generally causing mayhem, you must get them under control. A calm, orderly crowd of people will be evacuated much faster than a random group of running, screaming people.

The military is --and I know this will surprise a lot of you-- very comforting in its presence. For Joe Citizen, who has little to no knowledge of how the military works, the very presence of a calm, collected, professional soldier helps to reinforce the "Hey, I'm gonna be alright" mentality.

The soldier might very well be freaking the hell out in his own mind, but he will stick to his mission and put the safety of others before his own. That's just how it works.

So here's how the little scenario for the Cloverfield-style evacuation works out:

1) People are in a panic, confused and afraid.
2) Military shows up with quick-response vehicles (Humvees and the like). Nothing heavy quiet yet, but enough to assess the situation and bring order.
3) Military and police begin the process of calming people down, organizing them into controllable groups. Order is slowly restored.
4) Military starts to evacuate people according to protocol. This will have been practiced numerous times. Of course, there's no plan on the books for a giant monster attack, but that's besides the point. Since there is (apparently) no threat of radiation or chemical/biological hazards, it would have been similar to a plan for evacuating people after a terrorist attck similar to 9/11.

Now, the people we see being evacuated are walking in a calm manner. I'm going to say this is because they couldn't see the monster, and it was not in their general vicinity. Would people have freaked out and started to run if MGP showed up near them, within distance to kill them? Absolutely. If I was a civilian in such a situation, you bet your ass I'd start to run away as quickly as I could. The military would open fire, adding to the noise and confusion, but only because, well...they MUST open fire on it if it's a threat. At the time, they probably had no idea that a .50cal armor piercing round wouldn't even bruise the monster.

But we don't see MGP attack the evacuating citizens and military personnel, so we can assume they were rescued. That particular group, at least.

Now, this isn't directly military related, but...the reasons we don't see thousands of people at once, or millions of corpses strewn around are simple: People cost money to hire, even for a day. Cloverfield's budget was small for a movie.
Also, if there were bodies (and body parts) laying around EVERYWHERE, it would have knocked the movie up to an R rating...which I think they should have gone with in the first place.

Now: Was the military portrayed realistically? For the most part, yes.

The military personnel we can see act professionally, and don't act like stereotypical "RARR EVIL MILITARY!!" stereotypes. They don't shoot innocent people, they don't punch anyone in the face, they don't kidnap anyone for experiments. They are seen either a) fighting the monster, b) evacuating civilians, or c) treating the wounded.

The military's response time is...questionable, because they reacted very quickly. I'm not sure how far the closest National Guard unit is in that area, but from the time the Tag ship is attacked to the time we see the first military units, it's no more than 10 minutes. This assumes that fully-fueled, fully-armed first-response Humvees were able to get across to Manhattan Island during the midst of the panic.

Unless the Guard has units stationed in Manhatten itself, this is unlikely. Again, I'll chock this up to 'movie reality'.

Once we do see the military engage MGP, it's obvious that their inital barrage of small-arms fire and heavy machine guns have no effect. Even an accompanying M1 tank seems to only piss it off.

First of all, I highly doubt anyone in Rob's little rescue party would have even been able to hear anything for the next week, much less right there! They were standing directly in front of a large, multi-weapon engagement. Even a simple rifle going off near you is exceptionally loud, especially in a confined area (like a street between two buildings). When the M1 fires the 120mm cannon, it's LOUD. Like...hear-it-boom-from-3-miles-away loud. Anyone directly in front of a tank's main gun when it fires would be knocked down by the concussive wave, and instantly deafened. Probably for life. This is why tank crewmen wear sound-dampening headsets, and why infantry are advised to stay the hell away from the tank's main gun.

Apparently, MGP can withstand some ridiculous amounts of firepower. The M1 Abrams carries two main types of main gun rounds: HEAT and SABOT.

HEAT rounds destroy structures and vehicles by sending what is, basically, a dense jet of white-hot molten metal that burns through the target with explosive force (around 25 times the speed of sound) once the round impacts the target. A HEAT round can destroy a house. It can destroy a tank. It only pissed off MGP.

A Sabot round (technically, it's an APFSDS, or Armor-Piercing, Fin Stabilized, Discarding Sabot) has no explosive charge, but is even more deadly to hard targets. A dense, arrow-shaped Depleted Uranium penetrator is fired at the target at a speed of 5,700 feet per second, and uses pure kinetic energy to pierce the target. A modern Sabot round can kill every tank in the world with one hit.

MGP must be a powerful mofo.

Towards the end of the movie, we see MGP step on a Paladin self-propelled artillery vehicle. The military must have been getting desperate, as artillery weapons tend to stay very far from actual combat. Their ammunition would have also been less effective at defeating armor (natural armor, in this case), and they're not nearly as well-armored as an Abrams.

Later on, we see Rob and crew get evacuated in old Hueys. If the National Guard was in charge of evacuation, this would make sense, as the Guard tends to get, erm, less-than-new equipment. A Blackhawk can move faster and carry more passengers, so either the Blackhawks had already evacuated the majority of the survivors and the Hueys were doing mop-up work, or the Blackhawks never showed up.

A B-2 bomber is seen carpet-bombing MGP with, presumably, 500lb bombs. Once again, it only serves to piss off MGP. This is also the last time we directly see the military attack MGP.

The very last military unit we see is...well...I'm not sure what it is. We see only its silhouette, and it flies by very quickly. From what I could gather, it had forward-swept wings...which is very odd. No current US fighter, or any active-service fighter in the world, has forward-swept wings. Only the X-29 test platform and the Su-47 Berkut (never even built a working aircraft) had forward-swept wings.

Either JJ Abrams is a fan of Ace Combat, and decided to throw in an X-02, or he just really wanted a cool-looking jet to fly over at the end.