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"Cloverfield" may be tacky, but since when is tacky worth fussing about? Tacky is usually more risible than arousing, and many folks here seem incensed at this movie's very existence.
As other posters have pointed out, the 1954 "Gojira" had pretty much the same idea: A monster from the Id -- with radioactive breath -- attacks a country that had not so long before suffered horrific, almost incomprehensible attacks.
Ishiro Honda (flashing my nerd flag) reportedly based it on an incident when a Japanese fishing vessel wandered too close to a U.S. nuclear test, but it's pretty clear that post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki, anything U.S. and nuclear would be seen as a bad bet in Japan.
Tacky? Sounds like it. Immensely popular? Yep. The monster-movie version of fears of fallout? Probably, yeah.
To burrow back to the point: Stories like this derive from attempts to deal with, not necessarily exploit, fear.
Mary Shelley's "Modern Prometheus" stole life from the gods. At the time of writing, electricity and chemistry were new studies; Shelley tossed in a little old-time alchemy and came up with a new monster. People fear the unknown -- what hath science wrought? -- more than the known.
"Cloverfield" has done at least one thing undeniably right: Its marketing hasn't shown the monster, so anyone watching the trailer is left swimming in the murky subconscious. Is it a 90-foot-tall Osama? More likely his stand-in, a CGI reptile with Aliens-like jaws. Or whatever.
The point is, art (and yeah, filmmaking, even monster-movie filmmaking, is an art form; a thing doesn't become art by virtue of quality) sometimes disturbs. Or maybe a better word is provoked. A lot of people reading this review obviously feel provoked.
Not everybody enjoys stirring up darker feelings; perfectly understandable. I'm not trying to disregard or dismiss anyone's feelings.
But some of us like to dig into that ugly stuff, in a digestible, safe way; agitation can bring things to light that might otherwise have festered down below.
