I still believe that the movie was at least partially inspired by the old video game Rampage, which is a semi-popular theory on the Internet. “Cloverfield” is one of the cities that the monsters destroy, and the only city in the game that’s not real, if memory serves. One of the characters wears a “Slush-o” t-shirt, which is the substance that created the monsters in the game. I have to believe this was all intentional, as the Abrams camp isn’t likely to let nerd references slide past. 
Anyway, with my original theme shot, I had to think more about the movie. The interesting thing is that the story is told in a style that wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago. Every shot is from a handheld camera, which would have seemed absurd not that long ago. “Who would carry a camera through all of this?” our younger selves would have asked. They couldn’t have known that we’d live in a society obsessed with documenting everything and then making it available to anyone with the slightest interest. Our younger selves didn’t know about YouTube. They wouldn’t have believed that people are more interested in creating a record of what they experience than actually experiencing it. (My younger self would also be surprised to find out how that I spend my weekends writing about Donald Trump’s reality show. And then my younger self would weep.) In one of the movie’s recurring visual jokes, the camera often picks up shots of either people recording the chaos with their own cameras or cell phones.
