neither

Neither.
"Cloverfield" is more of an anthology.
Life can be arbitrary and comes without a warranty.

I would say it could be either or.
The movies don't have to be watched in a particular order. I enjoyed both films. 10 Cloverfield being my favorite of the two.

thanks

Yes, no problem whatsoever.

What started out as a joke has turned out to be a disaster

can i watch this without watching Cloverfield 2008?

Neither, it's just got the same producer.
It can't be a prequel or be taking place in parallel because Michelle has a modern iPhone. Everyone in Cloverfield uses 2007-8 phones and all the cars are from that period.
It can't be a sequel because nobody ever mentioned the massive monster that destroyed New York. If something like that happened they would have mentioned it.

What started out as a joke has turned out to be a disaster

I'd add just one thing, I suspect that he was a survivalist first and then a kidnapper. I think the bunker is too elaborate just to kidnap a girl, but it was very handy when he decided to. Maybe building a doomsday bunker then looking around at how secure and isolated it was helped him decide to go ahead and kidnap a woman. Like the old saying "when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail." When you have an underground dungeon every young woman looks like a princess to chain to the wall.

I saw it as a sequel simply because the invasion seemed quite advanced in this film (it seemed to be all along the coast), whereas in the first film I got the vibe that NYC was the first city to be hit.

Unfortunately you're wrong. It's been stated that the Cloverfield series is an anthology, similar to the twilight zone. Each movie will be completely different.

I think he went crazy talking about aliens and bunker building. He tried to get them to live in there with him just like Michelle and Emmett. It caused his wife to want to walk out on him and take his daughter from him. He probably killed them before they could escape, cursing them for abandoning him when he was trying to save them.
It would explain his abandonment issues and all of his talk about how you can't convince people that safety is in their best interest. He's now projecting the pain of that moment onto Michelle and Emmett.

It was pretty obvious that he saw her as little girl and denied the fact that she was woman (watch the synonym game part again)
Could it be, he did use to have a wife and little girl, and he's trying to replace both with Michelle? Hence the treating her like a child while clearly being shy and attracted to her as well?
It's either that, or he's actually into "little girls" and sees her as one. His intention was obvious after shaving and dressing up.. shudder 10x more creepy now.

Howard didn't even sound sure it was ET's, just that it's possible and didn't even express in a convincing way why he thought so anyway. all we know is his phase 1 and 2 strategies would be likely of ideal human invasions. phase 1 being chemical warfare. you're making wild assumptions I don't think you understood the movie perfectly.
Plot hole - Aspect of a film that is misunderstood or missed while using your smart phone.

I came here for answers
I got them all in 1 post
Brilliant post

Thanks for the very good plot analysis!

Sequel. Judging from these boards I feel like most people didn't understand the movie, and I feel like I understood it perfectly at least I assume I did.
John Goodman build the bunker to kidnap a child to be his daughter. He did this successfully until something happened which ended up in her getting away or killed (I missed this part partly). After all this, he was still working with NAVY with
satellites
which led him to discover the alien attacks before the media or at least he knew more about the aliens or their tactics than media.
Phase 1: Kill masses with huge Godzilla like creatures
Phase 2: Send smaller ships and smaller creatures to kill the smaller groups which escaped phase 1.
He obviously took off and wanted to go to his shelter to survive it. He had the bunker already stocked since his plan was to live with kidnapped child for the rest of his life. He couldn't make runs to supermarket obviously specially if police knew that he was involved in kidnapping. There is very thin possibility that he stocked it after he discovered aliens, but this is very unlikely since the amount of food he possessed was insane.
So he was driving to his bunker. He crashed to another car accidentally or possibly on purpose since he saw Michelle driving. Either way after the crash he saw potentially another chance to kidnap another little girl to be his daughter and yes she was grown woman, but you saw how he saw Michelle. It was pretty obvious that he saw her as little girl and denied the fact that she was
woman
(watch the synonym game part again)
After Emmett (who was helping John Goodman to originally build the shelter) saw huge flash of light, possibly explosion. This was either aliens attacking or one of bombs humans made to kill the huge Cloverfield monsters. He knew that something serious was going on, so obviously he ran to the shelter that he helped build. Obviously John Goodman didn't wanna let him in, so this why the conflict at the door which lead him to being hurt.
After this John Goodman knew what was going on, but couldn't tell the full truth to Michelle and Emmett since they could have either try their luck vs aliens or most likely not believe him. He couldn't lose his little girl
again
.

Well, it obviously doesn't take place before
Cloverfield
. There might be some overlap but I would say it largely follows that film.

SPOILER ALERT
Welltechnically, it's sort of neither. Althoughit can be seen as a 'sort of' prequel. The events that take place don't really have an effect on the outcome of the events in Cloverfield, but, they are kind of related a littlesame universe, time line leads up to Cloverfieldor does it????that's the question you ask when you've seen it (in part, but it's by no means the major premise of the film).