Post-9/11 us vs. them story via found footage

Rating: 5/10 (13 November 2019)

On Sept. 11, 2001, for the first time since Pearl Harbor, Americans found themselves attacked when they least expected it.
It's party time in the inscrutably titled "Cloverfield," as a roomful of millenials fete Rob (Michael Stahl-David) on the night before he's to leave for a job in Japan. We eavesdrop on conversational trivia, as Rob's best friend Hud (T.J. Miller) makes the rounds with a video camera, filming testimonials and gossip that Rob has bedded his brother's babe, Beth (Odette Annable).
From out of nowhere, a thunderous crash resounds, the lights go out, and, just as in America on 9/11, life would never be the same. New York erupts into a chaotic frenzy of panicked humans amidst bombs and collapsing skyscrapers. A clueless TV anchor announces an oil tanker may have capsized near the Statue of Liberty. They wish!
The horror in "Cloverfield" derives from the pandemonium amidst humans who do not know what is happening. The movie weakens as it reveals we are dealing with monsters here. How much scarier this would have been if the foe had remained amorphous and intangible!
This film effectively recreates the type of mayhem that ensued in the minutes and hours following the 9/11 attacks on New York City. How chilling to remember that World Trade Center denizens were told to remain in their office spaces after planes-as-bombs fueled an inferno in the upper reaches of the targets. In a similar case of the blind leading the blind, clueless civil authorities urge throngs to flee Manhattan -- "If you're not injured, you gotta keep moving...Keep moving in a quick and orderly fashion!" -- only to witness the Brooklyn Bridge crumble into the East River.
Our protagonists retrieve a voicemail from Beth, who begs Rob to help -- she's been pinned to the floor of her Columbus Circle apartment. Reaching her will mean flouting civil authorities' orders to flee south, but they head uptown anyhow. Tramping through a subway tunnel, member of the group Lizzie (Marlena Diamond) helps Hud avoid a monster but gets fatally stabbed. This grim interlude provides a lull in the action, a chance to catch one's breath, but this is only a delay in the next horrible twist in the plot. In "Cloverfield" we see the ultimate portrayal of being able to run, but not hide.
"We're gonna wait here till this passes," Rob pants under a bridge in Central Park. Safe haven? Not in a post-9/11 world. "I love you," says Beth. "I love you," he replies. In the end, that's really all that matters in our short and fragile lives.