I'm only a little mad about Cloverfield

Spoilers ahead, I guess, but actually my complaint is that there is nothing to spoil. The trailers for this movie made you think there would be some big revelatory explanation at the end of the rainbow. Like, "the Statue of Liberty got blown up -- don't you want to know why! Also what is Cloverfield -- don't you want to know why it's called that?" If I remember correctly the big teaser for the movie actually was, "What is Cloverfield?" That is probably easy enough to check but I'm not going to. The point is they lured you in by making you think there'd be some big sexy Shyamalan-style payoff. When in fact you get nothing of the sort; you find out right away that there is just some big squishy monster stomping around who sweats murderous spiders. You never find out where it came from or what it wants or why it's doing all these mean things. I guess maybe they will make a sequel or something where they show the whole event from someone else's perspective (weirdly I have to credit the kids sitting behind me in the movie theater with that idea; they were talking about sequel possibilities as we shuffled out) and reveal more information, but that'll only make a difference when it happens.

Everyone keeps talking about how this movie was so 9/11y but 9/11 was infinitely scarier not just because it was real (moot because as everybody knows it felt like a movie) but because as the plans were hitting one by one you got the sense there was a scheme unfolding, and you had no idea how elaborate it was. The whole day you wondered whether there were more planes in the air that had been hijacked, whether the shit was just beginning. In Cloverfield you knew the whole time that there was just this monster running around. It obviously didn't have a plan and it showed no signs of having any compelling motive for doing what it was doing.

Via Kibblesmith: