My friend Mike and I are serious fans of Lost. While I prefer to take a more Cartesian approach to analyzing the show (ie taking what we think we know, then eliminating everything that's based on assumptions and speculation, and then using Occam's Razor to come up with a unified theory), Mike likes to peruse the internet for the latest gossip and speculation on anything even remotely related. The downside to his method is that there's a lot of white noise in his analysis; he gets all the intelligent theories along with all the crazy and out-there ones, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. The upside is that he gets access to other people's secondhand information "directly" from the source. Usually he takes what he reads, forms a conclusion (or a set of probable conclusions) and then presents it to me, and I try to make sense of it in relation to what I already "know" about the show. Occasionally that'll pique my interest and I'll do my own online research. I think I'm better at it than he is. Shhh.
Anyway, Mike's picking up a lot of buzz about this JJ Abrams project. What we "know" so far: the production codename for the movie is "
Cloverfield" (though rumor is that the codename has now switched to "Slusho"). There's no indication that this will be the final title, or even that it has any relevance to the subject of the film. There's a dearth of official information about the movie, but we know it's not Abram's rendition of Star Trek because "Cloverfield" is slated for a January '08 release, while Star Trek is set for December '08. There was a website that indicated that the film would end up being called "The Parasite" (with that being the name of the monster as well), but it seems that website was a hoax. Supposedly Abrams has said through some official channel that he's set up some viral promotional websites. So far the only one discovered and confirmed is
1-18-08.com, according to Abrams himself (by way of Ain't It Cool News, an admittedly questionable source).
Speculation so far has run the gamut from a Lost tie-in, to Godzilla sequel, to Cthulhu license, to Voltron remake. Voltron was my first guess when I saw the trailer in theaters (it made sense initially, given the Transformers connection), but by the end of the trailer I knew that wasn't it. I haven't seen anything to justify the Cthulhu theory (aside from Lovecraftian themes on some websites that seemed like official viral tie-ins, but have reportedly been debunked as hoaxes), and I believe the Godzilla possibility has been debunked with the revelation that the rights to a new Godzilla film are tied up for the foreseeable future. We'll see what develops. I'm sure it'll be confusing, whatever it is.
