Thinking about CLOVERFIELD

“Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”
— Harry Lime to Holly Martins, looking down from the top of the Ferris wheel in The Third Man

Cloverfield is about the dots. My expectations were high for this movie, based largely on the reviews I’d seen online for the past few days. And remarkably, I wasn’t disappointed. Cloverfield takes the Big Monster genre and brings it down to the people, Harry Lime’s nameless, faceless “dots.” This film, in a very odd way, reminded me again that when we hear the numbers from, say, Iraq, there are flesh-and-blood people attached to those numbers. People with families and friends. There are also, quite likely, many many stories of bravery and loyalty and sacrifice. Stories we’ll never hear.

When was the last time a goddamn MONSTER MOVIE made you think about that?