Cloverfield review - Cloverfield isn't quite a religious experience, but it is a revelation; a galaxy apart from the stunted schlock you're probably braced for. This time -♋ unlike Snakes On A Plane - the online mythology and viral marketing is a beginning rather than an end.

Producer JJ Abrams and director Matt Reeves have created no less than th✱e first post-9/11 horror/sci-fi classic. War Of The Worlds? Behave. This is a smarter, edgier, more grounded grind through the terror riff-list. Breathless blockbuster entertainment with a bracing political payload and sa𒉰tire to spare.

From the moment the monster crashes the Manhattan work-leaving party ("I've seen it! It's alive!") Cloverfield absolutely does not stop. No asides, no let-ups, no languid mid-section swollen with bloodstained backstory. Just... a scorched and shattered c🅺ity under attack from something unknowable, unkillable and unstoppable.

Like we said - terror. Why should the Oscar-whoring hand-wringers (Lions For Lambs, Rendition, The Kingdom) enjoy a monopoly on pinging the mood of the times? Cynics will dismiss Cloverfield as a pointless, crash-bang din of shouting and shooting. Anyone can wobble a camera around and🍎 call it a movie, right?

Wrong. As Abrams has said, "King Kong was adorable, Godzilla was charming. I wanted this to be an American monster. Something insane and intense". That is, the titanic, lumbering sum of 🐷all American fears right here, right now…

Yes, the monster is revealed and yes, it is fantastically monstrous. But it's much, much more than a big scary-looking CG overlay. It's indiscriminat𒅌e and devastating; free of morality, bent on destruction for destruction's sake. Rack up the queasy, familiar images: fleeing citizens, streets choked with smoke and rubble; hapless authorities; powerless military. This, as the outgoing resident of the real-life White House knows all too well, is a problem that won't go away simply by bombarding it with military hardware.

Bolting the story to a Blair Witch-like conceit of discovered footage, Reeves layers in the sly, tim💧e-capsule satire on how we live now. With the entire action viewed through a sterile, static-twi▨tching sheen of hand-held camera, the gaggle of upscale twentysomethings are cast as a generation communicating with technology rather than biology. There’s cellphone-loss hysteria; futile looting at an electronics store; and when the head of the Statue Of Liberty tumbles down the street, it’s instantly mobbed and smothered in phone-cam flash.

To balance out the dark subtext, Reeves hasn't skimped on the fireworks. Cloverfield is blaring with sound and fury, roaring w༒ith cinematic shock and awe… A shell-firing tank stomped like a soda-can; the Brooklyn Bridge shattered and scattered into groaning steel smithereens; a half-toppled skyscraper wedged against its neighbour like a gigantic domino; and a barnstorming creature-feature money-shot beautifully timed to both tease and terrorise.

Moans about sketchy characters and dodgy dialogue are irrelevant. These aren't disaster-movie templates - good guy, fat guy, hysterical girl, selfish guy who deserves to die. They're you, me, everyman/ woman. In an era when we’re documenting our every thought and mood; mugging and moping into webcams and flushing the footage down the YouTube, everybody is a star - which means no-one is.

"What is that thing?" a character asks a soldier. "I don't know," he barks. "But it's ﷺwinning." "This is like a nightmare!" howls another... In such a tuned-in, turned-on age, Abrams/Reeves strike a spectacular chord of ultimate panic: unprotected and uninformed.