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Still the best film ever made about 9/11 -- about the 21st century -- Cloverfield is an unparalleled expressionist masterpiece. People talked about how it ripped its "don't show the monster" technique from Jaws, but it's closer to Lovecraft than anything else. Furthermore, it's an idea wholly indebted to the film's own era. We're afraid of what we don't know, what we can't see. Films like War of the Worlds come close to touching on post-9/11 anxieties so potently, but the first-person perspective gives Cloverfield the edge. Putting us in a single subjective point-of-view accentuates the terror (emphasis on terror) of everything we can't see or understand. The uncontrolled images create these chaotic spaces and incomprehensible geographies. It's an event of monumental importance, shown through the bias of a single insignificant bystander, influenced by a million private factors to which we'll never have access. Beth saying "I don't know why this is happening" in the final scene, choking back sobs, just destroyed me this go-round. Nobody knows anything. We never even see any of the main characters die directly. Every death is obscured, by tarps or other people or the direction the camera is pointing. I don't know how anyone can regard this as anything less than monumental.
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