The Laws of Physics in an Animation Universe - Cloverfield

Surely movie history has told a story of fascination and fantasy, with themes delving in the more realistic or the more hypnagogic. Directors, actors and writers have tried for decades to awe audiences with new inventions and spectacles. In the early part of 2008, a J.J. Abrahms film attempted to try and seal the gap between stark reality and the fantastical with his box office hit “Cloverfield.” Using a “shaky cam” technique, Abrahms brought us into downtown New York City when normal enough urbanites are flung into an abnormal situation. Long story short, a sub aquatic monster emerges and, through the use of its own animosity and the brutality of its human-sized offspring, reaps inescapable havoc on the capitol of the world. Though the audience literally follows the story through a camcorder, this sometimes frighteningly realistic tale doesn’t escape the physical flaws of most movies. Upon a second or third watch of the film, one may notice the painfully impractical anatomy of the Cloverfield monster itself, and how this anatomy magically works in the “Cloverfield” movieverse. An architect may gasp in disbelief at the phenomenal structural integrity of the buildings in NYC. Most alarming though, is the “Cloverfield” movieverse defies the laws of sound and light, with distant explosions intermingling with their booming, audible counterparts instead of preceding them. Could critics be wrong when they say Cloverfield is a “real” take on a monster movie?

Like most large animals, the elephant has a noticeably bulky mass. The only trait that seems to equal the height of an elephant is its width. Why are elephants so bulky? Why are their legs (like rhinoceroses and bears) so chunky and cylindrical? They need pillar-like appendages to support their enormous weight. Consider the fact that the average elephant weighs around 8 and ¼ tons (or 16,500 pounds). If an elephant had thinner legs, they would snap under the pressure of a gargantuan body attached to a bulbous head. With this in mind, consider the structural integrity of the Cloverfield monster. The movie certainly kept a lot of the monster’s identity shrouded in secrecy, but two years after the film’s release we can find a plethora of concept art and analytical footage of our beast.



We can only really ballpark the weight of the Cloverfield monster. If it roughly equaled the size of the Statue of Liberty (which is a modest comparison) it would weigh in at an astounding 225 tons (or 450,000 pounds). With the shrimpy hind legs seen above, and the front legs which seem to exact all the weight on to the monster’s knuckles, would it make any sense for Clover to do anything other than collapse, breaking most if not all the bones in it’s appendages?

Some may argue that because the monster is of unknown origin, that these laws of physics don’t apply. After all, the monster could be from some distant planet where bone density is stronger than that of any living creature on Earth. This would be true if it wasn’t for the fact that J.J. Abrahms himself has stated that Clover had been lying dormant in the ocean for thousands of years until a satellite fell from the sky and into the watery depths, waking it up.

On the DVD, the designers of Clover claim to have designed the monster to specifically convey a sense of realism, but if they had added a little more science to their fiction, they would’ve realized that scaling up something that looks a lot less supported than even a human is highly problematic. This alone would set back the intentions of Cloverfield. The promises of “building a better monster” would be false, portraying Clover as less practical than the old, cheesy looking, but bulky-legged Godzilla. It would seem that the only design addiction that the Clover creators weren’t able to let go of when creating a monster, is the one that is anatomically like a smaller creature but scaled bigger. Wouldn’t an artist know to collect the proper reference before mocking up such a plot-lined beast? Wouldn’t the difference between scale and proportion be an issue raised at some point?

The physical flaws of the actual monster are somewhat forgivable though, taking into account that Abrahms never used this movie as a persuasive argument to convince us that the animal was ever actually real. However, Abrahms would rightfully argue that buildings exist in the real world, and that the physics of the buildings in the movie would intentionally try to resemble the physics of buildings in the real world. With this being said, a key sequence in Cloverfield could be rendered scientifically blasphemous. Very few may know (but surely every architect should know) that a building is supported downward into its footing, which makes it hard to believe that the top half of a building would be able to lean on another and stay stable enough for our heroes to cross over.



Think of a building as a person. Standing up straight, a man or a woman is supported by a reasonable base (a responsibility delegated highly by our legs and feet), with a center of gravity located right in the center. Let’s say we were to take this same person, but not just lean them over, but also break their ankles. Would they be able to keep their balance or would they topple over? A building is supported by beams and pillars, and unlike bones that can bend and move, a beam has little resistance in terms of breaking apart if bent far enough.

Youtube Cloverfield video.

This movie suggests that if a building is leaning over, that all it’s infrastructure reacts like a skeleton, which is simply untrue. This is doubly hard to believe when at toward the beginning of the movie, when our monster first attacks the city, it’s able to topple the 57-story tall Woolworth building with ease (in the video 3:35). Does Cloverfield physics suggest that certain buildings react to gravity while others don’t?

Above all, the most hilarious physical flaw witnessed in this movie is the fact that light and sound travel at the same time. Partnering the scene toward the beginning of the movie when the Woolworth building is toppled, an explosion in the bay is seen by a group of people on their rooftop. In “Cloverfield,” the sight and sound of the explosion happen at the same time, suggesting that sound travels at the same speed as light. When noticed, such a small flaw either ruins the authenticity of such a crucial scene, or suggests to the viewer that this is a New York City that defies the laws of time and space. This can be viewed in the video above, at 1:58.

Before ruling this out as a minor knit pick, consider the elements that make up a thunder and lightning storm. A long-standing tradition for everyone around the world is to count the seconds between when we see a flash of lightning and when we hear the following boom of thunder. We are told that the best way to judge the distance of a lightning bolt is by the delay of its sound. Is this just an old myth? To be precise, light travels at 186,282.397 miles per hour, while sound trails behind at 741.5 per hour. When you factor that out, it means that light travels about 225.3 times faster than sound. The movie below demonstrates this point effectively.



From three miles away (which would roughly be the same distance if not more of the explosion in the bay in Cloverfield), Space Shuttle STS-117, first appears around 0:11. Notice the gap of silence. A faint hum becomes audible by 0:21, and a booming roar isn’t heard until 0:31 seconds. Cumulatively, it took 20 seconds until that gripping roar of the rocket ship, as opposed to Cloverfield’s painfully unrealistic 0 seconds. The laws of sound seem to hold up where they can’t be noticeably defected, which is pretty easy to do. After all, when the statue of liberty’s head skids down the street next to you, you’d no doubt hear it when it’s happening.

The hit movie Cloverfield, which to many stood as an emotionally gripping metaphor for 9/11, which grossed $170,764,033 on a $25,000,000 dollar budget, indeed revolutionized the “shaky cam” technique, making it more than just a novelty, along with the monster movie genre (which the American Godzilla claimed to do but failed at in 1998). Though many lamemen and women alike will forever appreciate some of the groundbreaking and grand aspects of the picture, it would be no surprise if physical scientists and biologists ended up hurling in movie theater lobbies all across the world (along with 33% of the world that suffers from motion sickness) simply due to the inconsistencies of the film. It would be less of an issue if Cloverfield was produced in a way where it embraced its existence in the movieverse, but for a story advertising itself to have taken place in our world, a great deal of credibility is lost by the end of the 85 perilous minutes.