8 Films With "Subtle" Messages (That Are REALLY Obvious)
4. Cloverfield
Cloverfield is Godzilla for the 9/11 age. A perfect, beautiful day is shattered by an incomprehensible disaster that changes the world forever. A monster, only ever glimpsed, seems to have descended on New York City, and it is thrashing about wildly.
Where many monster movies laboriously explain where the monsters come from, Cloverfield makes no direct attempt to let you know what is happening or why. Even two movies later, the Cloverfield franchise is doggedly enigmatic, refusing to fully account for the origins of the monsters.
This is part of Cloverfield's cleverness. Although we now know a great deal about the history of 9/11, for many at the time it was a completely inexplicable nightmare that seemed to have happened for no reason at all. Instead of getting bogged down in made up science and elaborate explanations, Cloverfield captures the sense of shock and terror felt by the powerless people on the ground as the city is torn apart around them.
Its handheld digital video aesthetic also recalls the amateur footage recorded by ordinary New Yorkers on 9/11. The shaky found-footage style of the cinematography in Coverfield gives the movie a dynamic, restless energy, but it also quite deliberately echoes this spontaneously-created, instantly-historic imagery.