Human point-of-view, as destruction looms above

Rating: Null/10 (24 July 2011)

I've seen this twice now and both times I'm striken by how quickly, how uniformly we are lowered inside it. What is so thrilling about it is the camera the filmmaker gives it. As with Spielberg's War of the Worlds or Cloverfield, destruction looms huge above us but we are stripped of our omnipresent role and given the subjective, exclusively human pov. We merely steal upwards glimpses of the larger theater. We'll see a few more films in this direction I'm sure, that will build on the failings of these attempts.
Sure, there is a storytelling spine that guides the vision. Familiar reversals, about a flawed protagonist who must rediscover his lost humanity (and limited pov) by broadening his view to encompass the other, the opposite. And the obvious social metaphor that gives it some topical relevance. For me however it comes back to our placement in the cinematic world.
What I would leave out of it is the wafer-thin cardboards of the human antagonists; the obnoxiously macho SWAT leader, the coldly calculated cruelty of the father-in-law.