Harry Knowles has seen Cloverfield, and he’s not only declared it a safe target for the sploogery of his army of fanboys––he’s got a surprisingly evocative take on how the much-hyped hybrid of Godzilla and Blair Witch breaks the monster movie mold:

The movie is fucking brilliant. It’s what we were told it was going to be. An intimate perspective on an impossibly grand scale human disaster beyond most human levels of comprehension…

I guarantee you that as this movie takes place… all the shit that you’ve seen in Giant monster movies is happening. Somewhere a general is screaming about nuking New York…. Somewhere is a politician screaming that you can’t nuke New York. Another General wants to know why our weapons are not affecting this thing. A PRESIDENT wants to know where it came from – and several thousand journalist are trying to figure all that out too.

But this film isn’t about the scientist, the generals, the Presidents, the mayors or any of the big people. This time, the film is from the perspective of those people that live in those buildings that the monster is breaking through. This is about the people running in the street that scream, “GODZILLA!!!” and run. This is about trying to survive that insanity. Not just that, but to try and save one life.

Knowles’ take becomes more interesting when placed alongside the “Cloverfield exploits 9/11″ hysteria that FOX News has been pumping over the past couple of weeks, which suggests that the film’s marketing, which features an image of a headless Statue of Liberty, is disrespectful to anyone who lived through or died on 9/11.

If Knowles’ read is accurate, Cloverfield flips the disaster movie perspective, showing us catastrophe management not from the top-down, not from the perspective of the extraordinarily brave, skilled and/or powerful few trying to solve the problem for the helpless masses, but from the masses themselves. For a post 9/11 monster movie, this seems fitting. Bush and Giuliani’s grandstanding aside, the dominant narratives about 9/11–including mainstream films like United 93 and World Trade Center, but also including very non-Hollywood phenomena, such as the fascination with The Falling Man–have shared that perspective, of the ordinary man’s dilemma in an extraordinary (and extraordinarily terrifying) situation.

And with all that in mind, the marketing image of the headless Statue of Liberty becomes all the more powerful. In a moment of absolute crisis, it’s impossible to have perspective outside of one’s immediate physical situation, and certainly the shared values and principles that supposedly unite the state are not a priority that comes ahead of personal safety. I imagine that the grand majority of New Yorkers (if not the grand majority of Americans) first saw the image of the burning World Trade Center, in person or on television, and their instant reaction was not “This is a time for patriotism,” but “Am I or am I going to be physically okay? Are the people I love physically okay?”

Cloverfield’s only real relationship to 9/11 may be that the experience of very real-world, close-to-home trauma has, consciously or not, inspired these filmmakers to examine how all of us somehow manage to find the strength to deal with tragedy and catastrophe when required. And as with the micro-genre of “9/11 films,” there seems to be in Cloverfield a surprisingly retro, go-go American populism: the focus is on the extraordinary behavior not just of those who are expected to behave extraordinarily because of a position of power, but also or even especially, the extraordinary behavior of those who are, as they say, right in the shit.

[Via Anne Thompson]