This Post is Spoiler Free

It’s hard to be a movie geek in the information age. Too many people out there want to spoil the fun. On one hand, you could say that we’re living in the Golden Age of Movie Geekdom. The studios have figured out that the fanboys are not only rabid for product, but that we have deep pockets. As a result, movie geeks have come out of hiding and have gone mainstream. I wonder how many of you knew what Comic Con was before a few years ago? Now a days, my mother-in-law is reading about on the front page of her local paper. But this mainstream acceptance has come with a price.

CLOVERFIELD comes out tomorrow. It’s the kind of movie that makes the fanboy in me all squishy with excitement. Just a scant six months ago, nobody even knew this movie existed. Then a strangely secretive trailer popped up before TRANSFORMERS. They didn’t even give us a title…just a release date. It blew our hair back. That they were able to do this was an amazing accomplishment considering there are exactly 5752 web sites devoted to talking about movies. But CLOVERFIELD took us all by surprise and instantly we were drooling. 1.18.08 could not come fast enough.

The surprise didn’t last very long though. Once word of the movie was out there, people started talking and speculating and now, spoiling.

There is a breed of fanboy that wants to go into a movie with as little advance knowledge as possible. These movie fans, and I count myself among them, will avoid reading early reviews or watching commercials. This was much easier to do back in the day. When I was a kid there were only a handful of sources for movie information: Premiere magazine, Fangoria, Entertainment Tonight and the occasional behind the scenes special on HBO. It was a simpler time when you could go into a movie blindly without knowing every plot detail. Trailers didn’t give away the best moments or tell you the whole plot. Movies were more mysterious and surprising.

But we now live in the age of the spoiler. Bloggers can’t help themselves but to post every picture, spill every secret and generally pick apart a movie before it’s even hit the theaters. The internet has become a minefield where I never know when I might accidentally stumble across picture of the CLOVERFIELD monster—even on sites that have nothing to do with movies!

I also feel that the internet has made us all a little bitter. People love to bitch and complain about everything. The hype around CLOVERFIELD has gotten so massive that there is no way the movie is going to live up to expectations. They could give out gold bars with every ticket and hire people to massage our shoulders while we watch the movie and I’m afraid that people would still complain about not getting their money's worth.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions. God knows that I have mine and that I share them here. But I try to cry foul on things that deserve it (yes, I’m talking about you Michael Bay and don’t think that I’ve forgotten about you, MEET THE SPARTANS). I’m going into CLOVERFIELD wanting to like it. And when the lights come up, if I’ve seen an entertaining monster movie than I will be happy. I’m not expecting the movie to revolutionize entertainment forever. I want a good story and I wanna see stuff get blowed up. And I don’t want anyone to tell me about it before I do.

I’m going to see CLOVERFIELD this weekend. First and foremost because I’m a movie geek and these kinds of movies are my lifeblood. But also I know that after this weekend the floodgates of information will be opened and there will be nothing to stop me from drowning in a sea of pictures, discussion and opinions of the movie that will not protect its secrets. I need to go opening weekend because that’s what it takes to be a true movie geek in the information age.