So this side plot in 24 immediately came to mind when watching this, albeit in a hazy way, as it's been years. Basically Jack Bauer is out there trying to stop a chemical attack or a nuclear one or some other post 9/11 fever dream, and his daughter ends up lost in the woods, a guy rescues her from a wild cougar or something, and she ends up going with him. He starts running an angle that the bomb is about to go off, or did already, after she in his bomb shelter. She later confronts him about it and expects he will go apeshit, he actually gives her his gun and tells her to watch out for the cougars.
That little subplot worked well to show what the general paranoid feeling of the times. Films started to explore the end of the world in a bleak, hopeless way, after ironically turning it into a complete joke in the late 90s, with fun shlock like Armageddon, Independence Day, to an extent, Event Horizon, too. The 2008 Cloverfield felt like a monster attack within a monster attack, the city swallowed them whole; with most of the deaths obscured either by the fast pace of shaky cam, or physical objects, the city is just as suffocating as the presence of the alien attackers.
I'm going to get into some spoilers briefly here, at the end. It hit me halfway through what John Goodman was going for here. The disheveled appearance, vague background, conspiracy theory rotted brain who turns to alcohol to cope - this is Steve Bannon. To skip ahead, this is what made the ending genius to me. Yes, it descends into what appears to be throwback schlock, hazmat suits made out of shower curtains and lovecraftian creatures of horror taken out by a measly, half assed molotov cocktails. Goodman is scarier than the CGI nightmare aliens, it takes that paranoia and shatters it, much like how Cloverfield deconstructed the fetishism of New York City, a void of life and death, both going constantly unnoticed. The actual threat itself is meaningless when psychopaths with acid baths and terminal schizophrenia inherit the Earth. What's preparedness if that's all that is left of those who live? Definitely recommend you watch this one, a lot of Misery and War of the Worlds going on here.
Drowning Mona works as a dark comedy, with a Thelma & Louise opener that cuts to the son of the person just killed, in his early twenties, hitting on a literal child. Nobody in this movie is likeable or tries to be, in the slightest, whatsoever. Jamie Lee Curtis looks into the camera almost in one scene where she delivers the line "I'm a 33 year old waitress!" with a straight face. It unravels in an interesting way and has a couple of funny scenes. It reminded me of another movie from the time that I think is massively underrated, Very Bad Things, that portrayed every character as an irredeemable piece of shit, wrapping them up in a satire of wedding culture. It has the rhythm of a HBO, Curb type of comedy show and I could see it working as a season long mystery sort of deal. As is, pretty pretty pretty good.
