With Cloverfield, producer J.J. Abrams and director Matt Reeves clearly had no intention of seriously addressing September 11th. As Keith Uhlich said, the movie’s more or less “a first person episode of Felicity interrupted by a humongous, pissed-off crustacean!” Serious political commentary was never the point.

And that’s fine. Watching WB-network-ready downtown hipsters get crushed by humongous monsters is every American moviegoer’s God-given right, or something like that. But the problem is that the film tries to have it both ways. So, despite the film’s political apathy (it’s more concerned with girl troubles than international affairs), we get shots that are clearly meant to invoke the terror and panic of that day’s events: buildings crash, sending walls of debris push through downtown streets; ash-covered New Yorkers walk zombie-eyed through the lower-east side; TV news reports lead with graphics declaring that the city is under attack. Yet somehow, not one of the movie’s characters mentions September 11th. Is it even remotely possible that the similarity wouldn’t occur to any of them?

It’s a cheap and, I think, telling, appropriation of the days’ events. On one hand, it doesn’t want anything to do with the reality of September 11th; on the other, it borrows the images and sensations from the day in service of what is no more (at best) than an agreeably shallow bit of entertainment. J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves, it seems, are exclusively interested in the day as spectacle, for its “wow factor,” as if no one should much worry about reimagining the 9-11 as a theme-park ride and ignore the rest