Cloverfield 9/11 propaganda

The virally-hyped Paramount movie Cloverfield opens nationwide today.

It seems to accomplish several psychological effects with regard to 9/11 and the "War on Terror":

1) Revives imagery and visceral fear of 9/11. Cam-corder style intensifies and personalizes the effect.

2) Reinforces sense of implacable, "alien" evil threat--complete with totemic "decapitation" of the Statue of Liberty and venomous "parasites" that attack without warning.

3) Showcases latest military hardware (eg. F-22) and tactics (notably urban warfare), and portrays the Pentagon as savior.

4) Introduces use of nuclear weapons (even on US soil) as a hypothetically necessary option.

Pretending to oppose "exploitation", FOX has already used it as an opportunity to evoke 9/11 and display a 9/11 victim's mother.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8ovbOCBqg0

Time is promoting it with a heavy hand:

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1704356,00.html

"We wanted to let people live through their wildest fears but be in a safe place where the enemy is the size of a skyscraper instead of some stateless, unseen cowardly terrorist."

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1704366,00.html?xid=rss-arts

"What if a previously unknown agent of evil were to destroy a world-famous New York City edifice? Not the World Trade Center, this time, but the Statue of Liberty — the Lady's head is tossed like a used beer can onto a lower Manhattan street. And the Statue decapitator is not a team of al-Qaeda operatives but a scaly, 300-ft. monster, an American Godzilla."

"So there's no way you can watch downtown panic and crumbling towers without it seeming a bit... familiar. Naturally the director says, he didn't want to diminish or exploit the residue of grief from 9/11. And, as the press notes inform us, "The visual effects teams even took care that the collapsing buildings in the film were older-looking structures that did not evoke the style of the structures that were attacked six years earlier."

And CNN:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/18/review.cloverfield/index.html

"Scenes of New Yorkers running from a swirling cloud of dust and debris cynically evoke the nightmare of 9/11; later sequences suggest the kind of urban firefights we read of in Iraq."

http://www.comicmix.com/news/2008/01/13/cloverfield-big-monster-flick-or-9-11-allegory-by-michael-h-price/

"A larger-than-life disaster film, Cloverfield addresses the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in much the same way that Inoshiro Honda’s Gojira, or Godzilla, of 1954, helped Japan to come belatedly to terms with the bombings in 1945 of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

"Producer J.J. Abrams has shaped Cloverfield (due next week) as a New York-under-siege story that catches its characters as thoroughly off-guard as the 9/11 attacks caught civilization-at-large."